
Pass "BE A5 Q 
Book_S^^L 



The Misuse of Mind 



International Library of Psychology 
Philosophy and Scientific Method 

General Editor - - - - C. K. Ogden, m.a. 

(Magdalene College, Cambridge). 

VOLUMES ALREADY ARRANGED: 

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 
by G. E. Moore, Litt.D. 

CONFLICT AND DREAM 

by W. H. R. Rivkks, F.R.S. 

THE MEASUREMENT OF EMOTION 
by W. Whately Smith 

Introduction by William Brown. 

THE ANALYSIS OF MATTER 
by Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. 

MATHEMATICS FOR PHILOSOPHERS 
by G. H. Hardy, F.R.S. 

PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES 

by C. G. Jung, M.D., LL.D. 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REASONING 

by EUGENIO RlGNANO 

THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY 
by William Brown, M.D., D.Sc. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 
by E. von Hartmann 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF MUSICAL AESTHETICS 
by W. Pole, F.R.S. 

Edited by Edward J. Dent. 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC 
by Edward J. Dent 

SOME CONCEPTS OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 
by C. D. Broad, Litt.D. 

PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC 
by L. Wittgenstein 

Introduction by Bertrand Russell. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ■ AS IF 
by H. Vaihinger 

THE LAWS OF FEELING 
by F. Paulhan 

THE HISTORY OF MATERIALISM 
by F. A. Lange 

COLOUR-HARMONY 

by James Wood and C. K. Ogden 

THE STATISTICAL METHOD IN ECONOMICS 
AND POLITICS 
by P. Sargant Florence 

THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 
by I. A. Richards 



The Misuse of Mind 

A Study of Bergson's 
Attack on Intellectualism 



By 

KARIN STEPHEN 

Formerly Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge 



With a Prefatory Letter by 

HENRI BERGSON 



m 



NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY, INC. 
LONDON : KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., Ltd. 

1922 



^v 



<*y 



To Professor Henri Bergson 
With respect and gratitude 






^ 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. 



I. 

II. 

III. 



Prefatory Note 

Preface . 

Explanation . 

Fact 

Matter and Memory 



page 

7 

9 

i5 

47 

75 



PREFATORY NOTE 

Being an extract front a letter by Professor Henri Bergson 

Ayant lu de pres le travail de Mrs. Stephen 
je le trouve interessant au plus haut point. 
C'est une interpretation personelle et originale 
de Fensemble de mes vues — interpretation qui 
vaut par elle-meme, independamment de ce 
qui j' ai ecrit. L'auteur s'est assimile I' esprit 
de la doctrine, puis, se degageant de la materi- 
alite du texte elle a developpe a sa maniere, 
dans la direction qu'elle avait choisi, des idees 
qui lui paraissaient fundament ales. Grace a 
la distinction qu'elle etablit entre " fact " et 
" matter/ ' elle a pu ramener a T unite, et 
presenter avec une grande rigueur logique, des 
vues que j'avais ete oblige, en raison de ma 
methode de recherche, d'isoler les unes des 
autres. Bref, son travail a une grande valeur ; 
il temoigne d'une rare force de pensee. 

HENRI BERGSON. 



PREFACE 

The immense popularity which Bergson's 
philosophy enjoys is sometimes cast up against 
him, by those who do not agree with him, as 
a reproach. It has been suggested that Berg- 
son's writings are welcomed simply because 
they offer a theoretical justification for a 
tendency which is natural in all of us but 
against which philosophy has always fought, 
the tendency to throw reason overboard and 
just let ourselves go. Bergson is regarded 
by rationalists almost as a traitor to philoso- 
phy, or as a Bolshevik inciting the public to 
overthrow what it has taken years of painful 
effort to build up. 

It is possible that some people who do not 
understand this philosophy may use Bergson *s 
name as a cloak for giving up all self-direction 
and letting themselves go intellectually to 
pieces, just as hooligans may use a time of 
revolution to plunder in the name of the Red 
Guard. But Bergson's philosophy is in reality 
as far from teaching mere laziness as Com- 
munism is from being mere destruction of the 
old social order. 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

Bergson attacks the use to which we usually 
put our minds, but he most certainly does not 
suggest that a philosopher should not use 
his mind at all ; he is to use it for all it is 
worth, only differently, more efficiently for the 
purpose he has in view, the purpose of knowing 
for its own sake. 

There is, of course, a sense in which doing 
anything in the right way is simply letting 
one's self go, for after all it is easier to do a 
thing well than badly — it certainly takes much 
less effort to produce the same amount of 
result. So to know in the way which Bergson 
recommends does in a sense come more easily 
than attempting to get the knowledge we want 
by inappropriate methods. If this saving of 
waste effort is a fault, then Bergson must 
plead guilty. But as the field of knowledge 
open to us is far too wide for any one mind to 
explore, the new method of knowing, though it 
requires less effort than the old to produce the 
same result, does not thereby let us off more 
easily, for with a better instrument it becomes 
possible to work for a greater result. 

It is not because it affords an excuse for 
laziness that Bergson's philosophy is popular 
but because it gives expression to a feeling 
which is very widespread at the present time, 
a distrust of systems, theories, logical con- 
structions, the assumption of premisses and 
then the acceptance of everything that follows 
logically from them. There is a sense of im- 

10 



PREFACE 

patience with thought and a thirst for the 
actual, the concrete. It is because the whole 
drift of Bergson's writing is an incitement to 
throw over abstractions and get back to facts 
that so many people read him, hoping that 
he will put into words and find an answer to 
the unformulated doubt that haunts them. 

It was in this spirit that the writer under- 
took the study of Bergson. On the first 
reading he appeared at once too persuasive 
and too vague, specious and unsatisfying : a 
closer investigation revealed more and more a 
coherent theory of reality and a new and 
promising method of investigating it. The 
apparent unsatisfactoriness of the first reading 
arose from a failure to realize how entirely 
new and unfamiliar the point of view is from 
which Bergson approaches metaphysical specu- 
lation. In order to understand Bergson it is 
necessary to adopt his attitude and that is just 
the difficulty, for his attitude is the exact 
reverse of that which has been inculcated in 
us by the traditions of our language and 
education and now comes to us naturally. 
This common sense attitude is based on certain 
assumptions which are so familiar that we 
simply take them for granted without ex- 
pressly formulating them, and indeed, for 
the most part, without even realizing that 
we have been making any assumptions at all. 

Bergson's principal aim is to direct our 
attention to the reality which he believes we 

ii 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

all actually know already, but misinterpret 
and disregard because we are biassed by pre- 
conceived ideas. To do this Bergson has to 
offer some description of what this reality is, 
and this description will be intelligible only 
if we are willing and able to make a profound 
change in our attitude, to lay aside the old 
assumptions which underlie our every day 
common sense point of view and adopt, at 
least for the time being, the assumptions from 
which Bergson sets out. This book begins 
with an attempt to give as precise an account 
as possible of the old assumptions which we 
must discard and the new ones which we must 
adopt in order to understand Bergson's descrip- 
tion of reality. To make the complete re- 
versal of our ordinary mental habits needed 
for understanding what Bergson has to say 
requires a very considerable effort from any- 
one, but the feat is perhaps most difficult of 
all for those who have carefully trained them- 
selves in habits of rigorous logical criticism. 
In attempting to describe what we actually 
know in the abstract logical terms which are 
the only means of intercommunication that 
human beings possess, Bergson is driven 
into perpetual self-contradiction, indeed, para- 
doxical though it may sound, unless he con- 
tradicted himself his description could not be 
a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader 
to pass over the self contradictions, hardly 
even being aware of them, and grasp the under- 

12 



PREFACE 

lying meaning : the trained logician is at 
once pulled up by the nonsensical form of the 
description and the meaning is lost in a welter 
of conflicting words. This, I think, is the real 
reason why some of the most brilliant intellec- 
tual thinkers have been able to make nothing 
of Bergson s philosophy : baffled by the self- 
contradictions into which he is necessarily 
driven in the attempt to convey his meaning 
they have hastily assumed that Bergson had 
no meaning to convey. 

The object of this book is to set out the 
relation between explanations and the actual 
facts which we want to explain and thereby 
to show exactly why Bergson must use self- 
contradictory terms if the explanation of 
reality which he offers is to be a true one. 

Having first shown what attitude Bergson 
requires us to adopt I have gone on to describe 
what he thinks this new way of looking at 
reality will reveal. This at once involves 
me in the difficulty with which Bergson 
wrestles in all his attempts to describe reality, 
the difficulty which arises from the funda- 
mental discrepancy between what he sees the 
actual fact to be and the abstract notions 
which are all he has with which to describe it. 
I have attempted to show how it comes about 
that we are in fact able to perform this 
apparently impossible feat of describing the 
indescribable, using Bergson's descriptions of 
sensible perception and the relations of matter 

13 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

and memoty to illustrate my point. If we 
succeed in ridding ourselves of our common- 
sense preconceptions, Bergson tells us that we 
may expect to know the old facts in a new 
way, face to face, as it were, instead of seeing 
them through a web of our own intellectual 
interpretations. I have not attempted to 
offer any proof whether or not Bergson's 
description of reality is in fact true : having 
understood the meaning of the description it 
remains for each of us to decide for himself 
whether or not it fits the facts. 

KARIN STEPHEN. 

Cambridge, January, 1922. 



14 



CHAPTER I 

EXPLANATION 

In order to understand Bergson it is not 
necessary to have any previous acquaintance 
with philosophy, indeed the less the reader 
knows of current metaphysical notions the 
easier it may perhaps be for him to adopt the 
mental attitude required for understanding 
Bergson. For Bergson says that the tradition 
of philosophy is all wrong and must be broken 
with : according to his view philosophical 
knowledge can only be obtained by M a 
reversal of the usual work of the intellect. "* 
The usual work of the intellect consists in 
analysis and classification : if you have any- 
thing presented to you which you do not 
understand the obvious question to put your- 
self is, " what is it ? " Suppose in a dark 
room which you expected to find empty you 
stumble against something, the natural thing 
to do is to begin at once to try to fit your 
experience into some class already familiar 
to you. You find it has a certain texture 
which you class as rather rough, a temperature 

* Introduction to Metaphysics, page 34. 

15 B 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

which you class as warm, a size which you 
class as about two feet high, a peculiar smell 
which you recognise and you finally jump 
to the answer to your question : it is " a dog." 
This intellectual operation is a sample of the 
way in which it comes natural to us to set to 
work whenever we find ourselves confronted 
with any situation which we are not able to 
classify off hand, we are not easy till we can 
say what the situation is, and saying what 
consists in hitting upon some class with which 
we are already familiar to which it belongs : 
in this instance the question was answered 
when you succeeded in describing the situation 
to yourself as " stumbling upon a dog." Now 
you were only able to class what was stumbled 
upon as a dog after you had recognised a cer- 
tain number of properties as being those 
shared by dogs — the rough texture, the size, 
the smell. You analysed the situation as con- 
taining these qualities and thereupon classified 
what had been stumbled upon as a dog. 

Analysis and classification are the two 
methods which we are accustomed to rely 
upon for improving our knowledge in un- 
familiar situations and we are accustomed 
to take it that they improve our knowledge 
of the whole situation : anyone who said that 
after you were able to say what you had 
stumbled upon you knew less of the whole 
situation than you knew before would find it 
difficult to get you to agree. And yet this is 

16 



EXPLANATION 

very much the position which Bergson takes 
up. Analysis and classification, he would 
admit, are the way to get more knowledge, 
of a kind ; they enable us to describe situa- 
tions and they are the starting point of all 
explanation and prediction. After analysis 
and classification you were able to say, " I 
have stumbled upon a dog," and having got 
so far you could then pass on to whatever 
general laws you knew of as applying to the 
classes into which you had fitted the situation, 
and by means of these laws still more of the 
situation could be classified and explained. 
Thus by means of the general law, " dogs 
lick/' you would be furnished with an explana- 
tion if perhaps you felt something warm and 
damp on your hand, or again knowledge of this 
law might lead you to expect such a feeling. 
When what we want is to describe or to 
explain a situation in general terms then 
Bergson agrees that analysis and classification 
are the methods to employ, but he maintains 
that these methods which are useful for 
describing and explaining are no use for finding 
out the actual situation which we may want 
to describe or explain. And he goes a step 
further. Not only do these methods fail to 
reveal the situation but the intellectual atti- 
tude of abstraction to which they accustom 
us seriously handicaps us when we want not 
merely to explain the situation but to know 
it. Now it is the business of science to 

17 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

explain situations in terms of general laws and 
so the intellectual method of abstraction is the 
right one for scientists to employ. Bergson 
claims, however, that philosophy has a task 
quite distinct from that of science. In what- 
ever situation he finds himself a man may take 
up one of two attitudes, he may either adopt 
a practical attitude, in which case he will set 
to work to explain the situation in order that 
he may know what to do under the circum- 
stances, or he may take a speculative interest 
in it and then he will devote himself to know- 
ing it simply for the sake of knowing. It is 
only, according to Bergson, in the former case, 
when his interest is practical, that he will 
attain his object by using the intellectual 
method of abstraction which proceeds by 
analysis and classification. These intellectual 
operations have such prestige, however, they 
have proved so successful in discovering 
explanations, that we are apt to take it for 
granted that they must be the best way to set 
to work whatever sort of knowledge we want : 
we might almost be tempted, off hand, to 
imagine that they were our only way of know- 
ing at all, but a moment's reflection will show 
that this, at any rate, would be going too far. 
Before we can analyse and classify and 
explain we must have something to analyse, 
some material to work upon : these operations 
are based upon something which we know 
directly, what we see, for instance, or touch 

18 



EXPLANATION 

or feel. This something is the foundation of 
knowledge, the intellectual operations of an- 
alysis classification and the framing of general 
laws are simply an attempt to describe and 
explain it. It is the business of science to 
explain and intellectual methods are the 
appropriate ones for science to employ. But 
the business of philosophy, according to 
Bergson, is not to explain reality but to know 
it. For this a different kind of mental effort 
is required. Analysis and classification, in- 
stead of increasing our direct knowledge, tend 
rather to diminish it. They must always start 
from some direct knowledge, but they proceed, 
not by widening the field of this knowledge but 
by leaving out more and more of it. More- 
over, unless we are constantly on the alert, 
the intellectual habit of using all our direct 
knowledge as material for analysis and classifi- 
cation ends by completely misleading us as to 
what it is that we do actually know. So that 
the better we explain the less, in the end, we 
know. 

There can be no doubt that something is 
directly known but disputes break out as soon 
as we try to say what that something is. Is 
it the (< real " world of material objects, or 
a mental copy of these objects, or are we 
altogether on the wrong track in looking for 
two kinds of realities, the " real " world and 
" our mental states/' and is it perceived events 
alone that are " real ? " This something 

19 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

which we know directly has been given various 
names: "the external object/ ' "sense data," 
" phenomena/' and so on, each more or less 
coloured by implications belonging to one or 
other of the rival theories as to what it is. 
We shall call it " the facts" to emphasise 
its indubitable reality, and avoid, as far as 
possible, any other implications. 

Controversy about " the facts " has been 
mainly as to what position they occupy in the 
total scheme of reality. As to what they are 
at the moment when we are actually being 
acquainted with them one would have thought 
there could have been no two opinions ; it 
seems impossible that we should make any 
mistake about that. No doubt it is impossible 
to have such a thing as a false experience, an 
experience is what it is, only judgments can 
be false. But it is quite possible to make a 
false judgment as to what experience we are 
actually having, or, still more commonly, 
simply to take for granted that our experience 
must be such and such, without ever looking 
to see whether it is or not. A small child 
taken to a party and told that parties are 
great fun if questioned afterwards will very 
likely say it has enjoyed itself though, if you 
happened to have been there, you may have 
seen clearly that it was really bewildered or 
bored. Even when we grow up names still 
have a tendency to impose upon us and dis- 
guise from us the actual nature of our experi- 

20 



EXPLANATION 

ences. There are not very many people who, 
if invited to partake, for instance, of the last 
bottle of some famous vintage wine, would 
have the courage to admit, even to themselves, 
that it was nasty, even though it was, in fact, 
considerably past its prime. Cases of this 
kind, with which we are all familiar, are 
enough to make us realize that it is actually 
quite possible to make mistakes even about 
facts which we know directly, to overlook the 
actual fact altogether because we have made 
up our minds in advance as to what it is sure 
to be. 

Now Bergson says that such errors are not 
confined to stray instances, such as we have 
noticed, in which the imposition of pre- 
conceived ideas can readily Be detected by a 
little closer attention to the actual facts. He 
believes that a falsification due to preconceived 
ideas, runs right through the whole of our 
direct experience. He lays the blame both 
for this falsification and for our failure to 
detect it upon our intellectual habit of relying 
upon explanation rather than upon direct 
knowledge, and that is one of the reasons why 
he says that our intellectual attitude is an 
obstacle to direct knowledge of the facts. The 
intellectual method of abstraction by which 
we analyse and classify is the foundation of 
all description and explanation in terms of 
general laws, and the truth is that we are, as 
a rule, much more preoccupied with explaining 

21 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

the facts which we know than with the actual 
experiencing of them. 

This preoccupation is natural enough. The 
bare fact which we know directly is not 
enough to enable us to carry on our everyday 
lives, we cannot get on unless we supplement 
it with some sort of explanation and, if it 
comes to choosing between fact and ex- 
planation, the explanation is often of more 
practical use than the fact. So it comes 
about that we are inclined to use the facts 
which we know directly simply as material 
for constructing explanations and to pay so 
little attention to them for their own sakes 
that we simply take it for granted that they 
must be what our explanations lead us to 
suppose they are. 

Now according to Bergson the attitude of 
mind required for explaining the facts con- 
flicts with that which is required for knowing 
them. From the point of view simply of 
knowing, the facts are all equally important 
and we cannot afford to discriminate, but for 
explanation some facts are very much more 
important than others. When we want to 
explain, therefore, rather than simply to 
know, we tend to concentrate our attention 
upon these practically important facts and 
pass over the rest. For in order to describe 
and explain a situation we have to classify it, 
and in order to do this we must pick out in it 
properties required for membership of some 

22 



EXPLANATION 

one or other of the classes known to us. In 
the situation which we originally considered 
by way of illustration, for instance, you had 
to pick out the qualities of roughness, warmth 
and so on, in order to classify what you had 
stumbled upon as " a dog." Now the picking 
out of these particular qualities is really an 
operation of abstraction from the situation 
as a whole : they were the important features 
of the situation from the point of view of 
classifying what you had stumbled upon, but 
they by no means exhausted the whole 
situation. Our preoccupation with explaining 
the facts, then, leads us to treat what we know 
directly as so much material for abstraction. 
This intellectual attitude, as Bergson calls 
it, though practically useful, has, according 
to him, two grave drawbacks from the point 
of view of speculation. By focussing our 
attention upon anything less than the whole 
fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, 
he says we distort what we knew originally : 
furthermore just in so far as we make a selec- 
tion among the facts, attending to some and 
passing over others, we limit the field of direct 
knowledge which we might otherwise have 
enjoyed. For these two reasons Bergson 
insists that it is the business of philosophy to 
reverse the intellectual habit of mind and 
return to the fullest possible direct knowledge 
of the fact. " May not the task of philoso- 
phy/' he says, " be to bring us back to a fuller 

23 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

perception of reality by a certain displacement 
of our attention ? What would be required 
would be to turn our attention away from the 
practically interesting aspect of the universe 
in order to turn it back to what, from a practi- 
cal point of view, is useless. And this conver- 
sion of attention would be philosophy itself/'* 

At first sight it appears paradoxical and 
absurd to maintain that our efforts to analyse, 
classify and explain the facts tend rather to 
limit than to extend our knowledge, and 
furthermore distort even such facts as we still 
remain acquainted with. Common sense has 
no doubt that, far from limiting and distorting 
our knowledge, explanation is the only possible 
way in which we can get beyond the little 
scraps of fact which are all that we can ever 
know directly. 

If the views of common sense on this ques- 
tion were formulated, which, for the most 
part, they are not, they would be something 
like this. Until we begin to think the facts 
which we know directly are all muddled 
together and confused : first of all it is neces- 
sary to sort them by picking out qualities from 
the general confusion in which they are at first 
concealed. It is possible that during this 
process, which is what is called analysis, we 
may be obliged, at first, to overlook some of 
what w r e already know in a vague sort of way, 
but this insignificant loss is compensated by 

*La Perception du Changement, page 13. 
24 



EXPLANATION 

the clarity of what remains, and is, in any case, 
only temporary. For as the analysis pro- 
ceeds we gradually replace the whole of the 
original mere muddle by clear and definite 
things and qualities. At first we may be able 
to distinguish only a few qualities here and 
there, and our preoccupation with these may 
possibly lead us, for a time, to pay insufficient 
attention to the rest of the muddle which we 
know directly but have not yet succeeded in 
analysing. But when the analysis is com- 
pleted the distinct things and qualities which 
we shall then know will contain all that we 
originally knew, and more besides, since the 
analysis will have revealed much that was 
originally concealed or only implicit in the 
original unanalysed fact. If, for instance, you 
look at a very modern painting, at first what 
you are directly aware of may be little more 
than a confused sight : bye and bye, as you 
go on looking, you will be able to distinguish 
colours and shapes, one by one objects may be 
recognised until finally you may be able to 
see the whole picture at a glance as composed 
of four or five different colours arranged in 
definite shapes and positions. You may even 
be able to make out that it represents a 
human figure, or a landscape. Common sense 
would tell you that if your analysis is complete 
these colours and shapes will exhaust the 
whole of what you originally knew and more- 
over that in the course of it much will have 

25 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

been discovered which originally you could 
hardly be said to have known at all, so that 
analysis, far from limiting your direct know- 
ledge, will have added to it considerably. 
Starting, then, originally, from a very meagre 
stock of direct knowledge, analysis, according 
to the common sense view, by discovering 
more and more qualities, builds up for us 
more and more direct knowledge. 

Bergson begins just the other way up. 
He starts from the idea of a whole field of 
direct knowledge vastly more extended than 
the actual facts of which we are normally 
aware as making up our direct experience. 
He calls this w T hole field of knowledge " virtual 
knowledge/ ' This field of virtual knowledge 
contains the whole of the actions and reactions 
of matter in which our body has its part at any 
moment, the multitude of stimulations which 
actually assail the senses but which we nor- 
mally disregard, together with all the responses 
by which our bodies adjust themselves to these 
stimulations, and, in addition, the whole of our 
past. For Bergson the problem is to explain, 
not how we increase our direct knowledge, 
but how we limit it : not how we remember, 
but how we forget. " Our knowledge/' he 
says, " far from being built up by a gradual 
combination of simple elements, is the result 
of a sharp dissociation. From the infinitely 
vast field of our virtual knowledge we have 
selected, to turn into actual knowledge, 

26 



EXPLANATION 

whatever concerns our action upon things ; 
the rest we have neglected . The brain appears 
to have been constructed on purpose for this 
work of selection. It is easy enough to show 
that this is so in the case of memory. Our 
past, as we shall show in the next lecture, is 
necessarily preserved, automatically. It sur- 
vives in its entirety. But it is to our practical 
interest to put it aside, or at any rate only to 
accept just so much of it as can more or less 
usefully throw light on the present situation 
and complete it. The brain enables us to 
make this selection : it materialises the useful 
memories and keeps those which would be of 
no use below the threshold of consciousness. 
The same thing may be said of perception : 
perception is the servant of action and out of 
the whole of reality it isolates only what 
interests us ; it shows us not so much the 
things themselves as what we can make of 
them. In advance it classifies them, in 
advance it arranges them ; we barely look at 
the object, it is enough for us to know to what 
category it belongs/'* 

According to Bergson the facts which we 
actually know directly in the ordinary course 
are discriminated out of a very much wider 
field which we must also be said in a sense to 
know directly though most of it lies outside 
the clear focus of attention. This whole field 
of virtual knowledge is regarded as standing 

* La Perception du Changement, pages 12 and 13. 
27 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

to the actual facts to which we usually devote 
our attention, much as, for instance, the whole 
situation of stumbling upon something in a 
dark room stood to the single quality of 
roughness : in both cases there is a central 
point in the full focus of attention which we 
are apt to look upon as the fact directly 
known, but this central point is really sur- 
rounded by a vastly wider context and this 
too is known in some sense though it is com- 
monly ignored. 

For all philosophies, whether they be 
Bergson's or the view of common sense or any 
other, the actual facts which require to be 
explained are the same, and, though any 
positive assertion as to what these facts are 
may be hotly disputed, it will probably be 
admitted that as we ordinarily know them 
they consist in some direct experience, un- 
deniable as far as it goes. The point at issue 
between Bergson and common sense is, pre- 
cisely, how far it does go. Both sides would 
admit that, in this fact directly known, what 
is in the full focus of attention at any given 
moment is very limited ; on the other hand 
both would admit that this fully focussed fact 
is set in a context, or fringe, with no clearly 
defined limits which also goes to make up the 
whole fact directly known though we do not 
usually pay much attention to it. The fact 
directly known being given the problem is to 
find out what it is and how it comes to be 

28 



EXPLANATION 

known. What is actually given and needs 
to be accounted for is the fact clearly focussed, 
with its less clearly denned fringe : Bergson's 
sweeping assumption of the existence of a 
further vast field of virtual knowledge in order 
to account for it, does, at first sight, seem 
arbitrary and unwarranted and in need of con- 
siderable justification before it can be accepted. 
For him the problem then becomes, not to 
account for our knowing as much as we do, 
but to see why it is that we do not know a 
great deal more : why our actual knowledge 
does not cover the whole field of our virtual 
knowledge. Common sense, on the other 
hand, sets out from the assumption of ignor- 
ance, absence of awareness, as being, as it were, 
natural and not needing any accounting for, 
and so it regards the problem as being to 
explain why any experience ever occurs at all. 
The assumption of ignorance as being the 
natural thing seems at first sight to need no 
justification, but this may well be due merely 
to our having grown accustomed to the com- 
mon sense point of view. When one begins 
to question this assumption it begins to 
appear just as arbitrary as the contrary stand- 
point adopted by Bergson. The actual facts 
are neither ignorance nor full knowledge and 
in accounting for them it is really just as 
arbitrary to assume one of these two extremes 
as the other. The truth appears to be that 
in order to account for the facts one must 
make some assumptions, and these, not being 

29 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

facts actually given, are bound to be more or 
less arbitrary. They seem more or less 
" natural " according as we are more or less 
accustomed to the idea of them, but they are 
really justified only according to the success 
with which they account for the actual facts. 

This idea of putting the problem of know- 
ledge in terms exactly the reverse of those 
in which it seems " natural " to put it was 
originally suggested to Bergson by his study 
of the important work on amnesia carried out 
by Charcot and his pupils, and also by such 
evidence as was to be had at the time when 
he wrote on the curious memory phenomena 
revealed by the use of hypnotism and by cases 
of spontaneous dissociation. It is impossible 
to prove experimentally that no experience is 
ever destroyed but it is becoming more and 
more firmly established that enormous num- 
bers of past experiences, which are inaccessible 
to ordinary memory and which therefore it 
would seem "natural" to suppose destroyed, 
can, if the right methods are employed, be 
revived even with amazing fullness of detail. 

In recent years since Bergson's books were 
first published, great strides have been made 
in the experimental investigation of the whole 
subject of memory, and the evidence thus 
obtained, far from upsetting the theory of 
memory suggested to him by the less extensive 
evidence which w T as available at the time when 
he wrote, lends it striking support. 

30 



EXPLANATION 

It appears to be accepted by doctors who 
use hypnotism in psychotherapy that under 
hypnotism many patients can perfectly well 
be taken back in memory to any period of 
their lives which the doctor chooses to ask for, 
and can be made not only to remember 
vaguely a few incidents which occurred at the 
time but actually to re-live the whole period 
in the fullest possible detail, feeling over again 
with hallucinatory vividness all the emotions 
experienced at the time. 

This re-living of past experience can, with 
some patients, be made to go on indefinitely, 
through the whole day, if the doctor has time 
to attend to it, every little incident being 
faithfully recalled though the actual event 
may have taken place 20 or 30 years previ- 
ously. And this happens not simply in the 
case of some very striking event or great crisis 
which the patient has been through, indeed 
it is just the striking events that are often 
hardest to recover. Some doctors, in order 
to get at the crisis, have found it useful occa- 
sionally to put patients back through one 
birthday after another right back even as 
early as their second year, to see at what point 
in their lives some particular nervous symptom 
first appeared, and each successive birthday 
is lived through again in the utmost detail.* 

Evidence of this kind does not, of course, 
prove that literally nothing is ever lost but it 

*See Psychology and Psychotherapy by Dr. William Brown. 

31 C 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

goes far towards upsetting the ordinary view 
that it is the rule for past experience to be 
annihilated and the exception for fragments 
here and there to be preserved in memory. 
The evidence which has so far been collected 
and which is rapidly accumulating at least 
seems to justify us in reversing this rule and 
saying rather that to be preserved is the rule 
for experience and to be lost would be the 
exception, if indeed any experience ever really 
is lost at all. 

This way of regarding the field of memory 
is further supported by such evidence as has 
been collected with regard to the influence of 
past experience in dreams, phobias and various 
forms of insanity, but in these cases, of course, 
it is only isolated past experiences here and 
there whose activity can be observed, and 
so, while helping to upset the most natural 
assumption that whatever cannot be recalled 
by ordinary efforts of memory may be 
assumed to have been destroyed, they do not 
lend very much support to the wider view 
put forward by Bergson, that no experience, 
however trivial, is ever destroyed but that all 
of it is included in the field out of which 
memory makes its practical selection. 

Taking all the evidence with regard to the 
preservation of past experience which is at 
present available, then, it is safe to say that, 
while it cannot, in the nature of things, abso- 
lutely prove Bergson's theory of knowledge, 

32 



EXPLANATION 

it in no way conflicts with it and even supports 
it, positively in the sense that the theory does 
fit the facts well enough to explain them 
(though it goes further than the actual facts 
and makes assumptions which can neither be 
proved nor disproved by an appeal to them) 
and negatively in the sense that what we now 
know about memory actually conflicts with 
the " natural " view that past experience 
which we are unable to recall has been 
destroyed, which is commonly appealed to to 
show the absurdity of the rival theory put 
forward by Bergson. 

On the assumption which Bergson makes 
of a much wider field of direct knowledge than 
that which contains what we are accustomed 
to regard as the actual facts which we know 
directly, Bergson 's problem becomes how to 
account for these facts being so much less than 
the whole field which we might have expected 
to have known. The answer, according to 
him, is to be found in our practical need of 
being prepared in advance for what is to come, 
at whatever sacrifice of direct knowledge of 
past and present facts. For practical pur- 
poses it is essential to use present and past 
facts as signs of what is coming so that we may 
be ready for it. To this end it is far more 
important to know the general laws according 
to which facts occur than to experience the 
facts themselves in their fullness. Our intel- 
lectual habits which prompt us to set to work 

33 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

at once in every unfamiliar situation to 
analyse and classify it fit us for discovering 
these laws : in so far as we are intellectual we 
incline to regard facts mainly as material for 
arriving at descriptions which themselves 
form the material out of which, by a further 
intellectual effort, explanations are framed in 
terms of general laws, which we need to know 
if we are to be ready for what is going to 
happen. Now these laws are general laws 
applying to whole classes of facts of one kind, 
or another. Facts, therefore, only form 
material for discovering laws in so far as they 
can be classified into kinds. 

The first step in classifying a fact is called 
analysis and consists in discovering common 
qualities which the fact possesses. According 
to Bergson the discovery of common qualities 
in a fact consists simply in learning to overlook 
everything in that fact except the respects in 
which it can be said to be of the same kind, 
and so to belong to the same class, as other 
facts. Far from adding to our direct know- 
ledge, as common sense supposes, he holds that 
analysis consists in shutting our eyes to the 
individuality of facts in order to dwell only 
upon what they have in common with one 
another. Starting, then, from the wider field 
of knowledge which he assumes Bergson 
explains how we reach the limited facts, which 
are all that we ordinarily know, by saying 
that these facts are arrived at by selection 

34 



EXPLANATION 

out of this much wider field. It is not the 
disinterested love of knowledge that deter- 
mines how much we shall actually attend to : 
our selection from the whole field of what 
facts we will attend to is determined by the 
pressing need of being prepared in advance 
for the facts which are to come. We attend 
only to so much of the whole of what is, in 
some sense, directly known to us as will be 
useful for framing the general laws which 
enable us to prepare in advance for what is 
coming. This practical utility explains why 
analysis and classification seem to us to be 
the obvious way of dealing with what we 
know. 

The work of abstraction by which, treating 
the facts directly known as so much material 
for framing explanations, we pass from these 
actual facts to the general laws which explain 
them, falls into four stages, and at each stage, 
according to Bergson, as we go further and 
further from the original fact directly known, 
the two vices of the intellectual method, 
limitation and distortion of the actual fact, 
become more and more apparent. 

Starting from the fact directly known, the first 
thing, as we have seen, is to learn to distinguish 
common qualities which it shares in common 
with some, but not all, other facts ; the next 
thing is to classify it by fitting it into the 
further groups to which these various qualities 
entitle it to belong. The moment a quah^y 

35 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

has been distinguished in a fact that fact has 
been fitted into a class, the class which consists 
of all the facts in which that quality can be 
distinguished. Thus, in our original illus- 
tration, when you first distinguished warmth, 
etc., you were beginning to fit your fact into 
classes : when you perceived warmth you 
fitted it into the class of warm objects, and it 
was the same with the other qualities of rough- 
ness, size and smell. This fitting of facts into 
classes according to the common qualities 
distinguished in them might be called a pre- 
liminary classification, but we shall use the 
term analysis for this preliminary grouping 
of facts according to their qualities, keeping 
the term classification for the next step, which 
you took when you realized " this is a dog," 
which consists in the discovery not of mere 
disconnected qualities but of " real things/' 
Just as every quality, such as " warm " or 
" hairy " or " sweet " or " cold " is a class of 
actual facts, so every i{ real thing " such as 
" a dog " or " an ice cream " is a class of 
qualities. Thus a quality is once, and a " real 
thing " is twice, removed from actual fact, 
and the more energetically we pursue the 
intellectual work of abstraction the further 
we get from the fact itself from which we 
began. The point of grouping facts into 
classes, whether by analysing them into 
qualities or classifying them into " real 
things," is that we can then apply to the 

36 



EXPLANATION 

particular fact all that we know to be true 
in general of whatever belongs to these 
various classes : in a word, once we have fitted 
a fact into a class we can apply to it all the 
general laws which are known to apply to 
that class. 

Common sense, as we saw, tells us that 
when we distinguish qualities in any given 
fact we obtain fuller knowledge than was given 
in the mere unanalysed fact, and this know- 
ledge is supposed to become fuller still when 
we go on to classify these qualities into " real 
things." Bergson, on the contrary, says that 
common qualities are arrived at by leaving 
out much of the fact originally known, while 
each successive stage in the process of abstrac- 
tion by which we explain facts, though it 
enables us to apply more and more general 
laws, yet leaves out more and more of the 
actual fact itself. Analysis begins this whit- 
tling away of the actual fact by confining our 
attention to qualities which do not exhaust 
the whole content of the actual fact. At this 
preliminary stage, however, though we con- 
centrate our attention on the quality, we still 
remain aware of the whole fact in which the 
quality has its setting. Classification carries 
the work of limitation a stage further. 
" Things " are a stage further removed from 
actual fact than qualities are since, while 
qualities are classes of facts, " things " are 
only classes of qualities. For classification 

37 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

into " things " therefore only the qualities 
in a fact will be of any use, and so, when we 
have reached the stage of classification, we 
need no longer burden our attention with 
the actual facts themselves in their entirety, 
we need pay attention only to the qualities 
which distinguish one group from another, 
For the purpose of classification into " things " 
the quality can stand for the whole fact : 
thus, as Bergson points out, we begin to lose 
contact with the whole fact originally known, 
since all the rest of it except the respects 
in which it can be analysed will henceforth 
tend to be ignored. 

The third stage in explaining facts in terms 
of general laws is called induction and con- 
sists in observing and formulating the relations 
of " things." " Things " are related to each 
other through their qualities. Qualities do 
not give us the whole fact, because, when 
we have distinguished qualities, we are in- 
clined to concentrate our attention on the 
quality at the expense of the rest of the fact ; 
nevertheless while we attend to actual qual- 
ities we have not lost contact with fact 
altogether. Induction, which consists in 
framing general laws of the relations of 
" things,' ' though it does not involve atten- 
tion to the whole fact, does at least demand 
attention to qualities, and so, while we are 
occupied with induction, we do still keep 
touch with fact to some extent. 

38 



EXPLANATION 

Once the relations of qualities have been 
observed and formulated, however, we need 
no longer attend to any part of the fact at all. 
Instead of the actual qualities we now take 
symbols, words, for example, or letters, or 
other signs, and with these symbols we make 
for ourselves diagrams of the relations in 
which we have observed that the qualities 
which they represent have stood to each 
other. Thus we might use the words 
" lightning before thunder " or first an L 
and then a T, to express the fact that in a 
storm we usually observe the quality of 
flashing before the quality of rumbling. Such 
laws do not actually reveal new facts to 
us, they can only tell us, provided we 
actually know a fact belonging to a given 
class, to what other class facts which we 
shall know bye and bye will belong. Thus, 
once we have classified facts as belonging 
to two classes, daylight and darkness, and 
have observed the invariable alternation of 
facts belonging to these classes, then, when- 
ever we know directly facts which can be 
classed as daylight, we can predict, according 
to our law of the alternation of the two 
classes, that bye and bye these facts will 
give place to others which can be classed 
as darkness and that bye and bye these in 
their turn will be replaced by facts which 
can again be classed as daylight. The prac- 
tical value of being able to make even such 

39 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

elementary predictions as these is obviously 
enormous, and this value increases as applied 
science, which is built up simply by the 
formulation of more and more comprehensive 
general laws of this type, widens the field 
of facts which can be explained. Once the 
laws are known, moreover, we are able to 
say to what class the facts must have be- 
longed which preceded a fact of any given 
class just as easily as we can say to what 
class the facts which are to follow it will 
belong. Thus, given a fact which can be 
classed as daylight, we can infer, by means 
of the law of the alternation of the classes 
daylight and darkness, not only that facts 
which can be classed as darkness will follow 
bye and bye, but also that facts of that class 
must have gone before. In this way we 
can explain the causes of all classifiable 
facts equally with their effects and so bridge 
over the gaps in our direct knowledge by 
creating a unified plan of the interrela- 
tions of all the classes to which facts can 
belong. By means of this plan we can 
explain any fact (that is classify its causes 
and effects), provided we can fit it into 
one or other of the known classes. This again 
is of enormous practical use because, when 
we know to what class present facts must 
belong if they are to be followed by the class 
of facts which we want, or not to be fol- 
lowed by those which we do not want, 

40 



EXPLANATION 

we can arrange our present facts accord- 
ingly. 

Bergson would not think of denying that 
this intellectual method, in which facts are 
used as material for abstraction, is of the 
utmost practical use for explaining facts 
and so enabling us to control them. He 
suggests, however, that our preoccupation 
with these useful abstractions, classes and 
their relations, misleads us as to the facts 
themselves. What actually takes place, he 
thinks, is a kind of substitution of the ex- 
planation for the fact which was to be ex- 
plained, analogous with what happens when 
a child at a party, or a guest at dinner, is 
misled about his actual sensations, only 
this substitution of which Bergson speaks, 
being habitual, is much harder to see through. 
Explanation, as we have seen, consists in 
constructing a plan or map in terms of 
such abstractions as classes and their re- 
lations, or sometimes, when the abstraction 
has been carried a step further, in terms 
simply of words or symbols, by means of 
which we represent the causal relations be- 
tween such of the actual directly known 
facts as can be classified. This plan 
is more comprehensive and complete than 
the actual facts which we know directly 
in the ordinary course of things, for which 
it stands, and it enables us to explain these 
facts in terms of the classes of causes from 

4* 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

which they follow, and the classes of effects 
which they produce. No explanation, of 
course, can actually acquaint us directly 
with the real antecedent or consequent facts 
themselves : it can only tell us to what classes 
these facts must belong. The terms of the 
plan by which we explain the facts, the 
classes, for instance, daylight and darkness, 
and their relation of alternation, or the words 
or symbols which stand for classes and 
relations are not themselves facts but ab- 
stractions. We cannot think in terms of 
actual facts : the intellectual activity by 
which we formulate general laws can only 
work among abstractions, and in order to 
explain a fact we are obliged to substitute 
for it either a class or word or other symbol. 
All description and explanation of facts 
consists in substitutions of this kind. The 
explanation applies provided the abstraction 
is based on fact, that is, provided it is possible 
to fit the fact to which the explanation is 
intended to apply into the class employed 
to explain it : the general law, for instance, 
about the alternation of the classes daylight 
and darkness will explain any facts which 
can be fitted into one or other of these classes, 
or again general laws about dogs, such as 
" dogs lick " will apply to whatever fact 
belongs at once to all the simpler classes, 
" warm," " rough," "of a certain size, and 
smell," out of which the class " dog " is 

42 



EXPLANATION 

constructed. The general law itself, however, 
does not consist of such facts but of ab- 
stractions substituted for the facts them- 
selves. Such substitution is extremely useful 
and perfectly legitimate so long as we keep 
firm hold of the fact as well, and are quite 
clear about what is fact and what only 
symbol. The danger is, however, that, being 
preoccupied with describing and explaining 
and having used abstractions so successfully 
for these purposes, we may come to lose our 
sense of fact altogether and fail to distinguish 
between actual facts and the symbols which 
we use to explain them. 

This, indeed, is just what Bergson thinks 
really does happen. No doubt an intelligent 
physicist is perfectly aware that the vibra- 
tions and wave lengths and electrons and 
forces by which he explains the changes 
that take place in the material world are 
fictions, and does not confuse them with the 
actual facts in which his actual knowledge 
of the material world consists. But it is 
much more doubtful whether he distinguishes 
between these actual facts and the common 
sense material objects, such as lumps of 
lead, pieces of wood, and so on, which he 
probably believes he knows directly but 
which are really only abstractions derived 
from the facts in order to explain them just 
as much as his own vibrations and wave 
lengths. When a scientist frames a hypoth- 

43 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

esis he employs the intellectual method of 
substitution with full consciousness of what 
he is about ; he recognises that its terms 
are abstractions and not facts. But the 
intellectual method of explaining by substi- 
tuting general abstractions for particular facts 
is not confined to science. All description 
and explanation, from the first uncritical 
assumptions of common sense right up to the 
latest scientific hypothesis employs the in- 
tellectual method of substituting abstractions 
for actual facts. The common sense world 
of things, events, qualities, minds, feelings, 
and so on, in which we all pass our every 
day lives is an early and somewhat crude 
attempt to describe the continually changing 
fact which each of us experiences directly, 
but it is perhaps more misleading than the 
later elaborate constructions of chemistry, 
physics, biology or physchology in that things 
and qualities are more easily mistaken for 
facts than more obviously hypothetical 
assumptions. Bergson points out that the 
various things of which this common sense 
world consists, solid tables, green grass, 
anger, hope, etc., are not facts : these things, 
he insists, are only abstractions. They are 
convenient for enabling us to describe and 
explain the actual facts which each of us 
experiences directly, and they are based upon 
these facts in the sense of being abstracted 
from them. The objection to them is that 

44 



EXPLANATION 

we are too much inclined to take it for granted 
that these things and qualities and events 
actually are facts themselves, and in so doing 
to lose sight of the real facts altogether. 
In support of his view that things having 
qualities in successive relations are mere 
abstractions Bergson points out that when- 
ever we stop to examine what it actually 
is that we know directly we can see at once 
that this fact does not consist of things 
and qualities at all : things and qualities 
are clearly marked off one from another,; 
they change as a series of distinct terms, but 
in what we know directly there are no clear 
cut distinctions and so no series. The assump- 
tion which we usually make that the facts 
must consist of such things as events and 
qualities and material objects is not based 
upon the evidence of direct knowledge : we 
make the assumption that the facts must 
be of this kind simply because they can be 
explained in these terms. 

It is true that there is some correspondence 
between the actual facts and the common 
sense world of solid tables and so on, and 
we usually jump to the conclusion that this 
correspondence would not be possible unless 
the facts had common qualities. There is 
no denying that facts can be classified and 
it seems only natural to take it for granted 
that whatever can be classified must share 
some quality with whatever belongs to the 

45 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

same class, that, indeed, it is just on account 
of all sharing the same common quality that 
facts can be classified as being all of the same 
kind. Thus common sense takes it for granted 
that all facts which can be classified as red, 
and so explained by all the general laws which 
we know about the relation of red things to 
other things, must share a common quality 
of redness. It seems only natural to make 
this assumption because we are so used to 
making it, but if we stop to examine the 
facts which we know directly we discover that 
they do not bear it out, and we are gradually 
driven to the conclusion that it is quite 
unwarranted. It is only bit by bit, as 
we gradually accustom ourselves to doubting 
what we have been accustomed to take 
for granted, that we realize how ill this 
assumption fits the facts. 



46 



CHAPTER II 

FACT 

Common sense starts out with the assumption 
that what we know directly is such things as 
trees, grass, anger, hope and so on, and that 
these things have qualities such as solidity, 
greenness, unpleasantness and so on, which 
are also facts directly known. It is not very 
difficult to show that, if we examine the facts 
which we know directly, we cannot find in 
them any such things as trees, grass, or minds, 
over and above the various qualities which 
we say belong to them. I see one colour and 
you see another : both of them are colours 
belonging to the grass but neither of us can 
find anything among the facts known to him 
corresponding to this grass, regarded as some- 
thing over and above its various qualities, 
to which those qualities are supposed to 
belong. 

This drives common sense back unto its 
second line of defence where it takes up the 
much stronger position of asserting that, 
while trees, grass, minds, etc., are not among 
the facts directly known, their qualities of 

47 d 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

solidity, greenness, etc., axe. It is usual to 
add that these qualities are signs of real trees, 
grass, etc., which exist independently but are 
only known to us through their qualities. 

It is much harder to attack this position, 
but its weakness is best exposed by consider- 
ing change as we know it directly, and com- 
paring this with change as represented in 
terms of qualities. Change, when repre- 
sented in terms of qualities, forms a series 
in which different qualities are strung together 
one after the other by the aid of temporal 
relations of before and after. The change 
perceived when we look at the spectrum 
would thus have to be described in terms 
of a series of colours, red before orange, 
orange before yellow, yellow before green, 
and so on. We might certainly go into 
greater detail than this, distinguishing any 
number of shades in each of the colours 
mentioned, but the description would still 
have to be given in the same form, that of 
a series of different colours, or shades of 
colour, strung together by relations of before 
and after. Now the fact which we know 
directly does not change so : it forms a con- 
tinuous becoming which is not made up of 
any number, however great, of fixed stages. 
When we want to represent this changing 
fact in terms of qualities we have to put 
together a series of qualities, such as red, 
orange, etc., and then say that " the colour " 

48 



FACT 

changes from one of these to another. We 
pretend that there is " a colour " which is 
not itself either red or green or orange or 
blue, which changes into all these different 
colours one after another. It is not very 
difficult to see that this abstract colour which 
is neither red nor orange nor green nor blue 
is not a fact but only an abstraction which 
is convenient for purposes of description : 
it is not quite so easy to see that this criticism 
applies equally to each of the separate colours, 
red, orange, etc., and yet a little attention 
shows that these also are really nothing but 
abstractions. With reference to the whole 
changing fact which is known directly through 
any period the change in respect of colour 
is clearly an abstraction. But just as there 
is no " colour " over and above the red, the 
orange, the green, etc., which we say we see, 
so there is really no " red," " orange," 
" green," over and above the changing pro- 
cess with which we are directly acquainted. 
Each of these, the red, the orange, and so on, 
just like the abstract " colour," is simply a 
fictitious stage in the process of changing 
which it is convenient to abstract when we 
want to describe the process but which does 
not itself occur as a distinct part in the actual 
fact. 

Change, as we know it directly, does not 
go on between fixed points such as these 
stages which we abstract, it goes on impar- 

49 




THE MISUSE OF MIND 

tially, as it were, through the supposed stages 
just as much as in between them. But 
though fixed stages are not needed to enable 
change to occur, simply as a fact, they are 
needed if we are to describe change and ex- 
plain it in terms of general laws. Qualities 
are assumptions required, not in order that 
change may take place, but in order that we 
may describe, explain, and so control it. 
Such particular qualities as red and green are 
really no more facts directly known than 
such still more general, and so more obviously 
fictitious notions as a colour which is of no 
particular shade, or a table, or a mind, apart 
from its qualities or states. All these fixed 
things are alike abstractions required for 
explaining facts directly known but not 
occurring as actual parts of those facts or 
stages in their change. 

Thus it appears that the common sense 
world of things and qualities and events is 
in the same position, with regard to the actual 
facts directly known as scientific hypotheses 
such as forces, electrons, and so on, in their 
various relations : none of these actually 
form parts of the fact, all of them are ab- 
stractions from the fact itself which are useful 
for explaining and so controlling it. Common 
sense stops short at things and qualities and 
events ; science carries the abstraction fur- 
ther, that is all the difference : the aim in 
both cases is the same, the practical one of 

5o 



FACT 

explaining and so controlling facts directly 
known. In both cases the method employed 
is the intellectual method of abstraction which 
begins by discriminating within the whole 
field directly known in favour of just so much 
as will enable us to classify it and ignoring 
the rest, and then proceeds to confuse even 
this selected amount of the actual fact with 
the abstract classes or other symbols in terms 
of which it is explained. We have just seen 
how the result, the worlds of common sense 
or science, differ from the actual facts in the 
way in which they change : these worlds of 
abstractions represent change as a series of 
fixed stages united by temporal relations, 
while the actual fact forms a continuous pro- 
cess of becoming which does not contain any 
such fixed points, as stages in relations. 

The more we shake ourselves free from the 
common sense and scientific bias towards sub- 
stituting explanations for actual facts the 
more clearly we see that this continuous pro- 
cess of changing is the very essence of what 
we know directly, and the more we realize 
how unlike such a continuous process is to 
any series of stages in relation of succession. 

The unsatisfactoriness of such descriptions 
is no new discovery : the logical difficulties 
connected with the attempt to describe change 
in terms of series of successive things or events 
have been familiar since the time when Zeno 
invented the famous dilemma of Achilles' 

5i 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

race with the tortoise. Mathematicians have 
been in the habit of telling us that these diffi- 
culties depend simply on the fact that we 
imagine the series of positions at which 
Achilles and the tortoise find themselves 
from moment to moment as finite : the de- 
vice of the infinite series, they say, satisfies 
all the requirements needed for representing 
change and solves all the logical difficulties 
which arise from it. Bergson's difficulties, 
however, cannot be solved in this way for 
they are not based upon the discovery of 
logical absurdities but upon the discrepancy 
between the description and the fact. What 
he maintains is that the description of change 
in terms of an infinite series of stages leaves 
out the change altogether. Zeno's logical 
dilemma as to how Achilles could ever catch 
up with the tortoise provided the tortoise 
was given a start, however small, may be 
countered by the ingenuity of the mathe- 
maticians' infinite series. Bergson's difficulty 
turns on a question of fact, not of logic, and 
cannot be so met. He solves the problem 
simply by denying that Achilles or the tor- 
toise ever are at particular points at particular 
moments. Such a description of change, he 
says, leaves out the real changing. And the 
introduction of the notion of an infinite series 
only makes the matter worse. For stages 
do not change, and so, if there is to be any 
change, it must, presumably, take place in 

52 






FACT 

between one stage and the next. But in 
between any two stages of an infinite series 
there are supposed to be an infinite number 
of other stages, so that to any given stage 
there is no next stage. Change, therefore, 
cannot take place between one stage and the 
next one, there being no next one, and since 
it is equally impossible that it should take 
place at any one of the stages themselves 
it follows that an infinite series of stages leaves 
out change altogether. Similarly a series of 
instants before and after one another leaves 
out of time just the element of passage, 
becoming, which is its essence. 

The truth, Bergson says, is that with fixed 
stages, no matter how many you take, and 
no matter in what relation you arrange them, 
you cannot reproduce the change and time 
which actually occur as facts directly known. 
If Achilles or the tortoise are ever at different 
places at different moments then neither 
of them really moves at all. Change and 
time, as represented by abstractions, accord- 
ing to the intellectual method, consist of 
stages in relations of succession, but the fact 
does not happen by stages and is not held 
together by relations : if we compare the 
representation with the fact we find that they 
differ profoundly in their form. 

According to Bergson this difference in 
form is one of the two essential respects in 
which abstractions fail to represent facts 

53 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

and in which, consequently, we are led into 
error as to the facts if we fail to distinguish 
them from the abstractions in terms of which 
we explain them, or take for granted that 
they correspond exactly with our explanations. 

Bergson gives the name " space " to the 
form which belongs to abstractions but not 
to actual facts : abstractions, he says, are 
" spatial/' but facts are not. This use of the 
word " space " is peculiar and perhaps un- 
fortunate. Even as it is ordinarily used the 
word " space " is ambiguous, it may mean 
either the pure space with which higher 
mathematics is concerned, or the public space 
which contains the common sense things and 
objects and their qualities which make up the 
every day world, or the private space of 
sensible perception. When Bergson speaks 
of " space/' however, he does not mean either 
pure or public or private space, he means an 
a priori form imposed by intellectual activity 
upon its object. This resembles Kant's use 
of the word, but Bergson's " space " is not, 
like Kant's, the a priori form of sense ac- 
quaintance, but of thought, in other words 
logical form. For Bergson "spatial" means 
" logical," and since so much misunderstanding 
seems to have been caused by his using the 
word " space " in this peculiar sense we shall 
perhaps do better in what follows to use the 
word " logical " instead. 

Now whatever is logical is characterised by 

54 



FACT 

consisting of distinct, mutually exclusive 
terms in external relations : all schemes, 
for instance, and diagrams, such as a series of 
dots one above the other, or one below the 
other, or one behind, or in front of the other, 
or a series of instants one after the other, or a 
series of numbers, or again any arrangements 
of things or qualities according to their 
relations, such as colours or sounds arranged 
according to their resemblance or difference ; 
in all these each dot or instant or number or 
colour-shade or note, is quite distinct from 
all the others, and the relations which join it 
to the others and give it its position in the 
whole series are external to it in the sense 
that if you changed its position or included it 
in quite another series it would nevertheless 
still be just the same dot or instant or number 
or quality as before. 

These two logical characteristics of mutual 
distinction of terms and externality of rela- 
tions certainly do belong to the abstractions 
employed in explanations, and we commonly 
suppose that they belong to everything else 
besides. Bergson, however, believes that 
these logical characteristics really only belong 
to abstractions and are not discovered in facts 
but are imposed upon them by our intel- 
lectual bias, in the sense that we take it for 
granted that the facts which we know directly 
must have the same form as the abstractions 
which serve to explain them. 

55 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

This habit of taking it for granted that 
not only our abstractions but also the actual 
facts have the logical characteristics of con- 
sisting of mutually exclusive terms joined by 
external relations is, according to Bergson, 
one of the two serious respects in which our 
intellectual bias distorts our direct acquaint- 
ance with actual fact. He points out, as we 
saw, that the facts with which we are ac- 
quainted are in constant process of changing, 
and that, when we examine carefully what is 
actually going on, we discover that this 
change does not really form a series of distinct 
qualities or percepts or states, united by 
external relations of time, resemblance, dif- 
ference, and so on, but a continuous process 
which has what we might call a qualitative 
flavour but in which distinct qualities, states 
and so on do not occur. 

" Considered in themselves " he says, " pro- 
found states of consciousness have no relation 
to quantity : they are mingled in such a way 
that it is impossible to say whether they are 
one or many, or indeed to examine them from 
that point of view without distorting them/' 
Now, strictly speaking, of course, these " states 
of consciousness " ought not to be referred 
to in the plural, it is, in fact, a contradiction 
to speak of " states of consciousness " having 
" no relation to quantity " : a plurality must 
always form some quantity. This contra- 
diction is the natural consequence of attempt- 

56 



FACT 

ing to put what is non-logical into words. 
It would have been just as bad to have referred 
to " the state of consciousness/' in the singular, 
while at the same time insisting that it con- 
tained resemblance and difference. The fact is 
that plurality and unity, like distinct terms 
and external relations, apply only to what- 
ever has logical form, and Bergson's whole 
point is to deny that the fact (or facts) directly 
known have this form, and so that any of 
these notions apply to it (or them.) 

This, of course, raises difficulties when we 
try to describe the facts in words, since words 
stand for abstractions and carry their logical 
implications. All descriptions in words of 
what is non-logical are bound to be a mass of 
contradictions, for, having applied any word 
it is necessary immediately to guard against 
its logical implications by adding another 
which contradicts them. Thus we say our 
experience is of facts, and must then hastily 
add that nevertheless they are not plural, 
and we must further qualify this statement 
by adding that neither are they singular. A 
description of what is non-logical can only 
convey its meaning if we discount all the 
logical implications of the words which, for 
want of a better medium of expression, we 
are driven to employ. Our whole intellectual 
bias urges us towards describing everything 
that comes within our experience, even if the 
description is only for our own private benefit 

57 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

Unfortunately the language in which these 
descriptions have to be expressed is so full 
of logical implications that, unless we are 
constantly on our guard, we are liable to be 
carried away by them, and then, at once, we 
lose contact with the actual facts. 

In order to get round this almost universal 
tendency to confuse abstractions with facts 
Bergson sometimes tries to get us to see the 
facts as they actually are by using metaphor 
instead of description in terms of abstract 
general notions. He has been much criticised 
for this but there is really a good deal to be 
said for attempting to convey facts by sub- 
stituting metaphors for them rather than by 
using the ordinary intellectual method of 
substituting abstractions reached by analysis. 
Those who have criticised the use of metaphor 
have for the most part not realized how little 
removed such description is from the ordinary 
intellectual method of analysis. They have 
supposed that in analysis we stick to the 
fact itself, whereas in using metaphor we 
substitute for the fact to be described some 
quite different fact which is only connected 
with it by a more or less remote analogy. 
If Bergson's view of the intellectual method 
is right, however, when we describe in abstract 
terms arrived at by analysis we are not stick- 
ing to the facts at all, we are substituting 
something else for them just as much as if we 
were using an out and out metaphor. Qualities 

58 



FACT 

and all abstract general notions are, indeed, 
nothing but marks of analogies between a 
given fact and all the other facts belonging 
to the same class : they may mark rather 
closer analogies than those brought out by 
an ordinary metaphor, but on the other hand 
in a frank metaphor we at least stick to the 
concrete, we substitute fact for fact and 
we are in no danger of confusing the fact 
introduced by the metaphor with the actual 
fact to which the metaphor applies. In 
description in terms of abstract general notions 
such as common qualities we substitute for 
fact something which is not fact at all, we 
lose touch with the concrete and, moreover, 
we are strongly tempted to confuse fact with 
abstraction and believe that the implications 
of the abstraction apply to the fact, or even 
that the abstraction is itself a real part of 
the fact. 

Language plays a most important part in 
forming our habit of treating all facts as 
material for generalisation, and it is largely 
to the influence of the words which we use 
for describing facts that Bergson attributes 
our readiness to take it for granted that facts 
have the same logical form as abstractions. 
It is language again which makes it so diffi- 
cult to point out that this assumption is mis- 
taken, because, actually, the form of facts is 
non-logical, a continuous process and not a 
series. The only way to point this out is 

59 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

by describing the nature of the non-logical 
facts as contrasted with a logical series, but 
the language in which our description of the 
non-logical facts has to be conveyed is itself 
full of logical implications which contradict 
the very point we are trying to bring out. 
Descriptions of non-logical processes will only 
be intelligible if we discount the logical im- 
plications inherent in the words employed, 
but in order to be willing to discount these 
implications it is necessary first to be con- 
vinced that there is anything non-logical to 
which such a description could apply. And 
yet how can we be convinced without first 
understanding the description ? It appears 
to be a vicious circle, and so it would be if 
our knowledge of change as a process really 
depended upon our understanding anybody's 
description of it. According to Bergson, 
however, we all do know such a process 
directly ; in fact, if he is right, we know 
nothing else directly at all. The use of 
description is not to give us knowledge of 
the process, that we already have, but only 
to remind us of what we really knew all along, 
but had rather lost contact with and mis- 
interpreted because of our preoccupation with 
describing and explaining it. Bergson's crit- 
icism of our intellectual methods turns simply 
upon a question of fact, to be settled by 
direct introspection. If, when we have freed 
ourselves from the preconceptions created by 

60 



FACT 

our normal common sense intellectual point 
of view, we find that what we know directly 
is a non-logical process of becoming, then we 
must admit that intellectual thinking is 
altogether inappropriate and even mischievous 
as a method of speculation. 

It is one of Bergson's chief aims to induce 
us to regain contact with our direct experience, 
and it is with this in view that he spends so 
much effort in describing what the form of 
this experience actually is, and how it com- 
pares with the logical form which belongs to 
abstractions, that is with what he calls 
" space." 

The form which belongs to facts but not 
to abstractions Bergson calls " duration." 
Duration can be described negatively by 
saying that it is non-logical, but when we 
attempt any positive description language 
simply breaks down and we can do nothing but 
contradict ourselves. Duration does not con- 
tain parts united by external relations : 
it does not contain parts at all, for parts 
would constitute fixed stages, whereas dura- 
tion changes continuously. 

But in order to describe duration at all 
we have logically only two alternatives, 
either to speak of it as a plurality, and that 
implies having parts, or else as a unity, 
and that by implication, excludes change. 
Being particularly concerned to emphasise 
the changing nature of what we know directly 

61 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

Bergson rejects the latter alternative : short 
of simply giving up the attempt to describe 
it he has then no choice but to treat this 
process which he calls duration as a plurality 
and this drives him into speaking of it as if 
it had parts. To correct this false impression 
he adds that these parts are united, not, like 
logical parts, by external relations, but in 
quite a new way, by " synthesis/' " Parts " 
united by synthesis have not the logical char- 
acteristics of mutual distinction and ex- 
ternality of relations, they interpenetrate 
and modify one another. In a series which 
has duration (such a thing is a contradiction 
in terms, but the fault lies with the logical 
form of language which, in spite of its un- 
satisfactoriness we are driven to employ 
if we want to describe at all) the " later 
parts " are not distinct from the " earlier" : 
" earlier and " " later " are not mutually 
exclusive relations. 

Bergson says, then, that the process of 
duration which we know directly, if it is 
to be called a series at all, must be described 
as a series whose " parts " interpenetrate, 
and this is the first important respect in 
which non-logical duration differs from a 
logical series. In " a series " which is used 
to describe duration not only are the 
" parts " not distinct but " their relations " 
are not external in the sense, previously 
explained, in which logical relations are 

62 



FACT 

external to the terms which they relate. 
A logical term in a logical series can change 
its position or enter into a wholly different 
series and still remain the same term. But 
the terms in a series which has duration 
(again this is absurd) are what they are 
just because of their position in the whole 
stream of duration to which they belong : 
to transfer them from one position in the 
series to another would be to alter their 
whole flavour which depends upon having 
had just that particular past and no other. 
As illustration we might take the last bar 
of a tune. By itself, or following upon 
other sounds not belonging to the tune, 
this last bar would not be itself, its par- 
ticular quality depends upon coming at the 
end of that particular tune. In a process 
of duration, then, such as tune, the " later" 
bars are not related externally to the 
H earlier " but depend for their character 
upon their position in the whole tune. In 
actual fact, of course, the tune progresses 
continuously, and not by stages, such as 
distinct notes or bars, but if, for the sake of 
description, we speak of it as composed of 
different bars, we must say that any bar 
we choose to distinguish is modified by the 
whole of the tune which has gone before it : 
change its position in the whole stream of 
sound to which it belongs and you change 
its character absolutely. 

63 E 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

This means that in change such as this, 
change, that is, which has duration, repeti- 
tion is out of the question. Take a song 
in which the last line is sung twice over as a 
refrain : the notes, we say, are repeated, 
but the second time the line occurs the 
actual effect produced is different, and that, 
indeed, is the whole point of a refrain. This 
illustrates the second important difference 
which Bergson wants to bring out between 
the forms of change which belong respectively 
to non-logical facts and to the logical abstrac- 
tions by which we describe them, that is 
between duration as contrasted with a logical 
series of stages. The notes are abstractions 
assumed to explain the effect produced, 
which is the actual fact directly known. 
The notes are stages in a logical series of 
change, but their effects, the actual fact, 
changes as a process of duration. From 
this difference in their ways of changing 
there follows an important difference be- 
tween fact and abstraction, namely that, 
while the notes can be repeated over again, 
the effect will never be the same as before. 
This is because the notes, being abstractions, 
are not affected by their relations which 
give them their position in the logical series 
which they form, while their effect, being a 
changing process, depends for its flavour 
upon its position in the whole duration to 
which it belongs : this flavour grows out 
of the whole of what has gone before, and 

64 



FACT 

since this whole is itself always growing by 
the addition of more and more " later stages," 
the effect which it goes to produce can never be 
the same twice over. 

This is why Bergson calls duration " crea- 
tive." 

No " two " positions in a creative process 
of duration can have an identical past 
history, every " later " one will have more 
history, every " earlier " one less. In a 
logical series, on the other hand, there is no 
reason why the same term should not occur 
over and over again at different points in the 
course of the series, since in a logical series 
every term, being distinct from every other 
and only joined to it by external relations, 
is what it is independently of its position. 

If Bergson is right therefore in saying that 
abstractions change as a logical series while 
the actual facts change as a creative process 
of duration, it follows that, while our descrip- 
tions and explanations may contain repeti- 
tions the actual fact to which we intend these 
explanations to apply, cannot. This, if true, 
is a very important difference between facts 
and abstractions which common sense en- 
tirely overlooks when it assumes that we are 
directly acquainted with common qualities. 

We have seen that this assumption is 
taken for granted in the account which is 
ordinarily given (or would be given if people 
were in the habit of putting their common 
sense assumptions into words) of how it is 

65 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

that facts come to be classified : facts are 
supposed to fall into classes because they 
share common qualities, that is because, 
in the changing fact directly known, the same 
qualities recur over and over again. There 
is no doubt that the fact with which we are 
directly acquainted can be classified, and 
it is equally undeniable that this fact is 
always changing, but if this change has the 
form of creative duration then its classifica- 
tion cannot be based upon the repetition of 
qualities at different " stages " in its course. 
It follows that either the fact with which 
we are directly acquainted does not change 
as a creative process, or else that we are quite 
wrong in assuming, as we ordinarily do, that 
we actually know qualities directly and that 
it is these qualities which form the basis of 
classification, and hence of all description 
and explanation. We have already seen that 
this assumption, though at first sight one 
naturally supposes it to be based on direct 
acquaintance, may really depend not on 
any fact directly known but on our pre- 
occupation with explanation rather than with 
mere knowing. 

But if we never really are acquainted with 
qualities, if qualities are, as Bergson says, 
mere abstractions, how come we to be able to 
make these abstractions, and why do they 
apply to actual facts ? If classification is not 
based on common qualities discovered by 

66 



FACT 

analysis and repeated over and over as actual 
facts directly known, on what is it based ? 
We certainly can classify facts and these 
abstract common qualities, if abstractions 
they be, certainly correspond to something in 
the facts since they apply to them : what is 
the foundation in directly knowu fact which 
accounts for this correspondence between ab- 
stractions and facts if it is not qualities actually 
given as part of the facts ? These questions are 
so very pertinent andat the same time so difficult 
to answer satisfactorily that one is tempted 
to throw over the view that the changing fact 
which we know directly forms a creative 
duration. This view is impossible to express 
without self-contradiction and it does not fit 
in with our accustomed habits of mind : 
nevertheless if we do not simply reject it at 
once as patently absurd but keep it in mind 
for a while and allow ourselves time to get 
used to it, it grows steadily more and more 
convincing : we become less and less able to 
evade these difficult questions by accepting the 
common sense account of what we know 
directly as consisting of a series of qualities 
which are repeated over and over, and more 
and more driven to regard it as a process in 
creative duration which does not admit of 
repetitions. There is no difficulty in seeing, the 
moment we pay attention, that what we know 
directly certainly does change all the time : 
but if we try to pin this change down and hold 

67 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

it so as to examine it we find it slipping 
through our fingers, and the more we look into 
the supposed stages, such as things and quali- 
ties and events, by means of which common 
sense assumes that this change takes place, 
the more it becomes apparent that these stages 
are all of them mere arbitrary abstractions 
dragged from their context in a continuous 
process, fictitious halting places in a stream 
of change which goes on unbroken. Un- 
biassed attention to the actual fact cannot fail 
to convince us that what we know directly 
changes as a process and not by a series of 
stages. 

The creativeness of this process is perhaps 
at first not quite so obvious, but if we look 
into the fact once more, with the object of 
observing repetitions in it, we realize that we 
cannot find any. It is true that you can pick 
out qualities which at first appear to recur : 
you may, for example, see a rose and then a 
strawberry ice cream, and you may be inclined 
to say that here you saw the quality pink 
twice over. But you can only say that what 
you saw was the same both times by abstract- 
ing what we call the colour from the whole 
context in which it actually appeared on the 
two different occasions. In reality the colour 
is not known in isolation : it has its place, in 
the whole changing fact in a particular context 
which you may describe in abstract terms as 
consisting of the shape and smell and size of 

68 



FACT 

the object together with all the rest of your 
state of mind at the moment, which were not 
the same on the two different occasions, 
while further this pink colour was modified 
on each occasion by its position in the whole 
changing fact which may again be described 
in abstract terms by saying, for instance, 
that the pink on the occasion of your seeing 
the strawberry ice cream, coming after the pink 
on the occasion of your seeing the rose, had a 
peculiar flavour of " seen before " which was 
absent on the previous occasion. Thus 
although, by isolating " parts " of the whole 
process of changing which you know directly, 
you may bring yourself for a moment to sup- 
pose that you are acquainted with repetitions, 
when you look at the whole fact as it actually 
is, you see that what you know is never the 
same twice over, and that your direct ex- 
perience forms, not a series of repetitions, but 
a creative process. 

But, once you grant that the fact which you 
know directly really changes, there is, accord- 
ing to Bergson, no getting away from the con- 
clusion that it must form a creative process of 
duration. For he thinks that creative dura- 
tion is the only possible way in which the 
transition between past and present, which 
is the essential feature of change and time, 
could be accomplished : all passing from past 
to present, all change, therefore, and all time, 
must, he says, form a creative process of 

69 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

duration. The alternative is to suppose that 
time and change form logical series of events 
in temporal relations of before and after, 
but, according to Bergson, this not only leaves 
out the transition altogether but is, even as 
it stands, unintelligible. The argument is 
this. 

If time and change are real, then, when the 
present is, the past simply is not. But it is 
impossible to see how, in that case, there can 
be any relation between past and present, for a 
relation requires at least two terms in between 
which it holds, while in this case there could 
never be more than one term, the present, 
ipso facto, abolishing the past. If, on the 
other hand, the past is preserved, distinct 
from the present, then temporal relations can 
indeed hold between them, but in that case 
there is no real change nor time at all. 

This dilemma all follows, of course, from 
regarding " past " and " present " as mutually 
exclusive and distinct, and requiring to be 
united by external relations, in short as terms 
in a logical series : for Bergson himself this 
difficulty simply does not arise since he 
denies that, within the actual changing fact 
directly known, there are any clear cut logical 
distinctions such as the words " past " and 
" present " imply. But when it comes to 
describing this changing fact distinct terms 
have to be employed because there are no 
others, and this creates pseudo-problems such 

70 



FACT 

as this question of how, assuming past and 
present to be distinct, the transition between 
them ever can be effected. The real answer 
is that the transition never is effected because 
past and present are, in fact, not distinct. 

According to Bergson a very large propor- 
tion of the problems over which philosophers 
have been accustomed to dispute have really 
been pseudo-problems simply arising out of 
this confusion between facts and the abstrac- 
tions by which we describe them. When 
once we have realized how they arise these 
pseudo-problems no longer present any diffi- 
culties ; they are in fact no longer problems 
at all, they melt away and cease to interest us. 
If Bergson is right this would go far to explain 
the suspicion which, in spite of the prestige of 
philosophy, still half unconsciously colours 
the feeling of the " plain man " for the " in- 
tellectual/ ' and which even haunts the philoso- 
pher himself, in moments of discouragement, 
the suspicion that the whole thing is trivial, 
a dispute about words of no real importance 
or dignity. If Bergson is right this suspicion 
is, in many cases, all too well founded : the 
discussion of pseudo-problems is not worth 
while. But then the discussion of pseudo- 
problems is not real philosophy : the thinker 
who allows himself to be entangled in pseudo- 
problems has lost his way. 

In this, however, the " intellectuals " are 
not the only ones at fault. " Plain men " are 

7i 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

misled by abstractions about facts just as 
much, only being less thorough, their mistake 
has less effect : at the expense of a little logical 
looseness their natural sense of fact saves them 
from all the absurdities which follow from 
their false assumptions. For the " intel- 
lectual " there is not this loophole through 
which the sense of fact may undo some of 
the work of false assumptions : the " intel- 
lectual " follows out ruthlessly the implica- 
tions of his original assumptions and if these 
are false his very virtues lead him into greater 
absurdities than those committed by " plain 
men." 

One of the most important tasks of phil- 
osophy is to show up the pseudo-problems so 
that they may no longer waste our time and 
we may be free to pursue the real aim of 
philosophy which is the reconquest of the 
field of virtual knowledge. Getting rid of the 
pseudo-problems, however, is no easy task : 
we may realize, for example, that the difficulty 
of seeing how the transition between past and 
present ever can be effected is a pseudo- 
problem because in fact past and present are 
not distinct and so no transition between them 
is needed. But since we have constantly to 
be using words which carry the implication 
of distinctness we are constantly liable to 
forget this simple answer when new problems, 
though in fact they all spring from this 
fundamental discrepancy between facts and 

7 2 



FACT 

the abstractions by which we describe them, 
present themselves in some slightly different 
form. 

The notion of duration as consisting of 
" parts " united by " creative synthesis " is a 
device, not for explaining how the transition 
from past to present really takes place (this 
does not need explaining since, " past " and 
" present " being mere abstractions, no transi- 
tion between them actually takes place at all), 
but for enabling us to employ the abstractions 
" past " and " present " without constantly 
being taken in by their logical implications. 
The notion of " creative synthesis " as what 
joins " past " and " present " in a process of 
duration is an antidote to the logical implica- 
tions of these two distinct terms : creative 
synthesis, unlike logical relations, is not 
external to the " parts " which it joins ; 
' parts " united by creative synthesis are not 
distinct and mutually exclusive. Such a 
notion as this of creative synthesis contradicts 
the logical implications contained in the 
notion of parts. The notion of " parts " 
united by " creative synthesis " is really a 
hybrid which attempts to combine the two 
incompatible notions of logical distinction 
and duration. The result is self -contradictory 
and this contradiction acts as a reminder 
warning us against confusing the actual chang- 
ing fact with the abstractions in terms of which 
we describe it and so falling into the mistake 

73 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

of taking it for granted that this changing fact 
must form a series of distinct stages or things 
or events or qualities, which can be repeated 
over and over again. 

At the same time there is no getting away 
from the fact that this changing fact lends 
itself to classification and that explanations 
in terms of abstractions really do apply to it 
most successfully. We are therefore faced 
with the necessity of finding some way of 
accounting for this, other than by assuming 
that the facts which we know directly consist 
of qualities which recur over and over again. 



74 



CHAPTER III 

MATTER AND MEMORY 

We have seen that, according to the theory 
of change which is fundamental for Bergson's 
philosophy, the changing fact which we know 
directly is described as a process of becoming 
which does not contain parts nor admit of 
repetitions. On the other hand this changing 
fact certainly does lend itself to analysis 
and classification and explanation and, at 
first sight at any rate, it is natural to suppose 
that whatever can be classified and explained 
must consist of qualities, that is distinct parts 
which can be repeated on different occasions. 
The problem for Bergson, if he is to establish 
his theory of change, is to show that the fact 
that a changing process can be analysed 
and classified does not necessarily imply that 
such a process must consist of distinct quali- 
ties which can be repeated. Bergson's theory 
of the relation of matter to memory sug- 
gests a possible solution of this problem as to 
how it is possible to analyse and so apply 
general laws to and explain duration : it 
becomes necessary, therefore, to give some 
account of this theory. 

75 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

Like all other descriptions and explanations, 
such an account must, of course, be expressed 
in terms of abstractions, and so is liable 
to be misunderstood unless the false impli- 
cations of these abstractions are allowed for 
and discounted. 

According to Bergson the only actual 
reality is the changing fact itself, everything 
else is abstraction : this reality however is 
not confined to the fragment called " our 
present experience " which is in the full focus 
of consciousness and is all that we usually 
suppose ourselves to know directly ; it includes 
besides everything that we are in a sense 
aware of but do not pay attention to, together 
with our whole past : for Bergson, in fact, reality 
coincides with the field of virtual knowledge, 
anything short of this whole field is an ab- 
straction and so falsified. Even to say " we 
know this fact " is unsatisfactory as implying 
ourselves and the fact as distinct things 
united by an external relation of knowing : 
to say " the fact is different from the abstrac- 
tion by which it is explained " similarly 
implies logically distinct terms in an external 
relation of difference, and so on. If Bergson 
is right in claiming that the actual fact is 
non-logical then obviously all attempts to 
describe it, since they must be expressed in 
terms of abstractions, will teem with false 
implications which must be discounted if the 
description is to convey the meaning intended. 

76 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

Bergson's claim is that if we allow our- 
selves to attend to the changing fact with 
which we are actually acquainted we are 
driven to a theory of reality different from the 
theory of things and relations accepted by 
common sense. The two abstractions by 
means of which he attempts to express this 
new theory are matter and memory. In the 
actual fact Bergson would hold that both 
these notions are combined by synthesis in 
such a way as no longer to be distinct, or 
rather, for this implies that they started 
distinct and then became merged, it would 
perhaps be better to say that these two notions 
are abstractions from two tendencies which 
are present in the actual fact. In the 
actual fact they combine and, as it were, 
counteract one another and the result is 
something different from either taken alone, 
but when we abstract them we release them 
from each other's modifying influence and 
the result is an exaggeration of one or other 
tendency which does not really represent 
anything which actually occurs but can be 
used, in combination with the contrary ex- 
aggeration, to explain the actual fact which 
may be described as being like what would 
result from a combination of these two 
abstractions. 

We will take matter first. 

Matter, for Bergson, is an exaggeration of 
the tendency in reality, (that is in the actual 

77 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

changing fact directly known) towards logical 
distinctness, what he calls " spatially/' His 
use of the word " matter " in this sense is 
again, perhaps, like his use of the word 
" space," rather misleading. Actual reality, 
according to him, is never purely material, 
the only purely material things are abstrac- 
tions, and these are not real at all but simply 
fictions. Bergson really means the same 
thing by " matter " as by " space " and that 
is simply mutual distinctness of parts and 
externality of relations, in a word logical 
complexity. Matter, according to this defin- 
ition of the word, has no duration and so 
cannot last through any period of time or 
change : it simply is in the present, it does 
not endure but is perpetually destroyed and 
recreated. 

The complementary exaggeration which, 
taken together with matter, completes Berg- 
son's explanation of reality, is memory. Just 
as matter is absolute logical complexity 
memory is absolute creative synthesis. To- 
gether they constitute the hybrid notion of 
creative duration whose " parts " inter- 
penetrate which, according to Bergson, comes 
nearest to giving a satisfactory description of 
the actual fact directly known which is, for 
him, the whole reality. 

The best way to accustom one's mind to 
these two complementary exaggerations, 
matter and memory, and to see in more 

78 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

detail the use that Bergson makes of them in 
explaining the actual facts, will be to examine 
his theory of sensible perception, since it is 
just in the act of sensible perception that 
memory comes in contact with matter. 

The unsophisticated view is that in sensible 
perception we become acquainted with things 
which exist whether we perceive them or not, 
and these things, taken all together, are 
commonly called the material world. Ac- 
cording to Bergson's theory also sensible 
perception is direct acquaintance with matter. 
The unsophisticated view holds further, how- 
ever, that this material world with which 
sensible perception acquaints us is the common 
sense world of solid tables, green grass, anger 
and other such states and things and qualities, 
but we have already seen that this common 
sense world is really itself only one among 
the various attempts which science and com- 
mon sense are continually making to explain 
the facts in terms of abstractions. The 
worlds of electrons, vibrations, forces, and 
so on, constructed by physics, are other 
attempts to do the same thing and the common 
sense world of " real " things and qualities 
has no more claim to actual existence than 
have any of these scientific hypotheses. Berg- 
son's matter is not identified with any one 
of these constructions, it is that in the facts 
which they are all attempts to explain in 
terms of abstractions, the element in the 

79 F 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

facts upon which abstractions are based 
and which makes facts classifiable and so 
explicable. 

The words by which we describe and ex- 
plain the material element in the facts in 
terms of series of distinct stages or events in 
external relations would leave out change if 
their implications were followed out con- 
sistently, but it is only a few " intellectuals " 
who have ever been able to bring themselves 
to follow out this implication to the bitter 
end and accept the conclusion, however 
absurd. Since it is obvious that the facts 
do change the usual way of getting round the 
difficulty is to say that some of these stages 
are " past " and some " present/' and then, 
not clearly realizing that the explanations 
we construct are not really facts at all, to 
take it for granted that a transition between 
past and present, though there is no room 
for it in the logical form of the explanation, 
yet somehow manages actually to take place. 
Bergson agrees that change does actually 
take place but not as a transition between 
abstractions such as " past/' and " present." 
We think that " past " and " present " must 
be real facts because we do not realize clearly 
how these notions have been arrived at. 
Once we have grasped the idea that these 
notions, and indeed all clear concepts, are 
only abstractions, we see that it is not neces- 
sary to suppose that these abstractions really 

80 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

change at all. Between the abstractions 
" the past " and " the present " there is no 
transition, and it is the same with events 
and things and qualities : all these, being 
nothing but convenient fictions, stand out- 
side the stream of actual fact which is what 
really changes and endures. 

Matter, then, is the name which Bergson 
gives to that element in the fact upon which 
the purely logical form appropriate to ab- 
stractions is based. The actual facts are 
not purely logical but neither are they com- 
pletely interpenetrated since they lend them- 
selves to classification : they tend to logical 
form on the one hand and to complete inter- 
penetration on the other without going the 
whole way in either direction. What Bergson 
does in the description of the facts which 
he offers is to isolate each of these tendencies 
making them into two separate distinct 
abstractions, one called matter and the other 
mind. Isolated, what in the actual fact was 
blended becomes incompatible. Matter and 
mind, the clear cut abstractions, are mutually 
contradictory and it becomes at once a pseudo- 
problem to see how they ever could combine 
to constitute the actual fact. 

The matter which Bergson talks about, 
being what would be left of the facts if memory 
were abstracted, has no past : it simply is 
in the present moment. If there is any 
memory which can retain previous moments 

81 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

then this memory may compare these previous 
moments with the present moment and call 
them the past of matter, but in itself, apart 
from memory, (and so isolated in a way in 
which this tendency in the actual fact never 
could be isolated) matter has no past. 

Noticing how very different the actual facts 
which we know directly are from any of the 
material worlds by which we explain them, 
each of which lays claim to being " the reality 
with which sensible perception acquaints us," 
some philosophers have put forward the view 
that in sensible perception we become ac- 
quainted, not with matter itself, but with 
signs which stand for a material world which 
exists altogether outside perception. This 
view Bergson rejects. He says that in sensible 
perception we are not acquainted with mere 
signs but, in so far as there is any matter at 
all, what we know in sensible perception is 
that matter itself. The facts which we know 
directly are matter itself and would be nothing 
but matter if they were instantaneous. For 
Bergson, however, an instantaneous fact is 
out of the question : every fact contains more 
than the mere matter presented at the mo- 
ment of perception. Facts are distinguished 
from matter by lasting through a period of 
duration, this is what makes the difference 
between the actual fact and any of the material 
worlds in terms of which we describe them : 
matter, is, as we have said, only an abstraction 

82 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

of one element or tendency in the changing 
fact which is the sole reality : memory is the 
complementary abstraction. Apart from the 
actual fact neither matter nor memory have 
independent existence. This is where Berg- 
son disagrees with the philosophers who 
regard the facts as signs of an independent 
material world, or as phenomena which mis- 
represent some ''thing" in "itself " which is what 
really exists but which is not known directly 
but only inferred from the phenomena. For 
Bergson it is the fact directly known that 
really exists, and matter and memory, solid 
tables, green grass, electrons, forces, the 
absolute, and all the other abstract ideas by 
which we explain it are misrepresentations of 
it, not it of them. 

Even Bergson, however, does not get away 
from the distinction between appearance and 
reality. The fact is for him the reality, the 
abstraction the appearance. But then the 
fact which is the reality is not the fact which 
we ordinarily suppose ourselves to know, 
the little fragment which constitutes " our 
experience at the present moment/ ' This is 
itself an abstraction from the vastly wider 
fact of our virtual knowledge, and it is this 
wider field of knowledge which is the reality. 
Abstraction involves falsification and so the 
little fragment of fact to which our attention 
is usually confined is not, as it stands, reality : 
it is appearance. We should only know 

83 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

reality as it is if we could replace this fragment 
in its proper context in the whole field of 
virtual knowledge (or reality) where it belongs. 
What we should then know would not be 
appearance but reality itself. It is at this 
knowledge, according to Bergson, that philo- 
sophy aims. Philosophy is a reversal of our 
ordinary intellectual habits : ordinarily 
thought progresses from abstraction to ab- 
straction steadily getting further from con- 
crete facts : according to Bergson the task 
of philosophy should be to put abstractions 
back again into their context so as to obtain 
the fullest possible knowledge of actual fact. 
In order to describe and explain this fact, 
however, we have to make use of abstractions. 
Bergson describes the fact known directly 
by sensible perception as a contraction of a 
period of the duration of matter in which the 
"past" states of matter are preserved along 
with the " present " and form a single whole 
with it. It is memory which makes this 
difference between matter and the actual 
facts by preserving " past " matter and com- 
bining it with " the present." A single per- 
ceived fact, however, does not contain 
memories as distinct from present material : 
the distinction between " past " and 
" present " does not hold inside facts whose 
duration forms a creative whole and not a 
logical series. Of course it is incorrect to 
describe facts as " containing past and present 

84 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

matter/ ' but, as we have often pointed out, 
misleading though their logical implications 
are, we are obliged to replace facts by ab- 
stractions when we want to describe them. 

An example may perhaps convey what is 
meant by saying that a fact is a contraction 
of a period of the duration of matter. Con- 
sider red, bearing in mind that, when we are 
speaking of the fact actually perceived when 
we see red we must discount the logical 
implications of our words. Science says that 
red, the material, is composed of immensely 
rapid vibrations of ether : red, the fact, we 
know as a simple colour. Bergson accepts 
the scientific abstractions in terms of which 
to describe matter, making the reservation 
that, if we are to talk of matter as composed 
of vibrations, we must not say that these 
vibrations last through a period of time 
or change by themselves, apart from any 
memory which retains and so preserves the 
" past f vibrations. If matter is to be 
thought of at all as existing apart from any 
memory it must be thought of as consisting 
of a single vibration in a perpetual present 
with no past. We might alter the description 
and say that this present moment of matter 
should be thought of as being perpetually 
destroyed and recreated. 

Now according to Bergson the red which 
we know directly is a period of the vibrations 
of matter contracted by memory so as to 

85 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

produce an actual perceived fact. As matter 
red does not change, it is absolutely discrete 
and complex, in a word, logical : as fact it is 
non-logical and forms a creative process of 
duration. The difference between matter and 
the actual fact is made by the mental act 
which holds matter as it were in tension 
through a period of duration, when a fact is 
produced, but which would have had to be 
absent if there had been no fact but simply 
present matter. Bergson calls this act 
memory : memory, he says, turns matter into 
fact by preserving its past along with its 
present. Without memory there would be no 
duration and so no change and no time. 
Matter, apart from memory would have no 
duration and it is just in this that it is dis- 
tinguished from actual fact. 

It is, however, of course, only by making 
abstractions that we can say what things 
would be like if something were taken away 
which actually is not taken away. Matter 
never really does exist without memory nor 
memory without its content, matter : the 
actual fact can only be described as a com- 
bination of the two elements, but this de- 
scription must not lead us into supposing 
that the abstractions, matter and memory, 
actually have independent existence apart 
from the fact which they explain. Only the 
actual fact exists and it is not really made up 
of two elements, matter and memory, but 

86 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

only described in terms of these two ab- 
stractions. 

Bergson's account of perception differs 
from the account ordinarily given in that 
perception is not described as a relation which 
is supposed to hold between a subject and an 
object : for Bergson there is no " I," distinct 
from what is perceived, standing to it in a 
relation of perception. For an object, to be 
perceived consists, not in being related to a 
perceiver, but in being combined in a new 
way with other objects. If an object is 
combined by synthesis with other objects 
then it is perceived and so becomes a fact. 
But there is no mind over and above the 
objects which perceives them by being related 
to them, or even by performing an act of 
synthesis upon them. To speak of " our " 
perceiving objects is a mere fiction : when 
objects are combined by synthesis they be- 
come perceptions, facts, and this is the same 
as saying that they are minds. For Bergson 
a mind is nothing but a synthesis of objects. 
This explains what he means by saying that 
in direct knowledge the perceiver is the object 
perceived. 

Actually he thinks such notions as the per- 
ceiver and the object and the relation which 
unites them, or again matter and the act of 
synthesis which turns matter into fact, are 
nothing but abstractions : the only thing 
there really is is simply the fact itself. These 

8 7 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

abstractions, however, do somehow apply to 
the actual facts, and this brings us back to 
our problem as to how it is that the actual 
fact, which is in creative duration, lends 
itself to classification : how it is that general 
laws in terms of abstractions which can be 
repeated over and over again, can apply to 
the actual fact which does not contain 
repetitions ? 

Facts lend themselves to explanation when 
they are perceived as familiar. In this per- 
ceived familiarity, which is the basis of all 
abstraction, and so of all description and 
explanation, past as well as present is in- 
volved, the present owing its familiarity to 
our memory of past facts. The obvious 
explanation of perceived familiarity, would 
be, of course, to say that it results from our 
perceiving similar qualities shared by past 
and present facts, or relations of similarity 
holding between them. But Bergson must 
find some other explanation than this since he 
denies that there can be repetition in actual 
facts directly known. 

Whenever there is actual fact there is 
memory, and memory creates duration which 
excludes repetition. Perceived familiarity 
depends upon memory but memory, accord- 
ing to Bergson, does not work by preserving 
a series of repetitions for future reference. 
If we say that memory connects " the past " 
with " the present " we must add that it 

88 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

destroys their logical distinctness. But of 
course this is putting it very badly : there 
is really no " logical distinctness " in the 
actual fact for memory to " destroy " : our 
language suggests that first there was 
matter, forming a logical series of distinct 
qualities recurring over and over, and 
then memory occurred and telescoped the 
series, squeezing " earlier " and " later " 
moments into one another to make a creative 
duration. Such a view is suggested by our 
strong bias towards regarding abstractions as 
having independent existence apart from the 
real fact from which they have been 
abstracted : if we can overcome this bias 
the description will do well enough. 

According to Bergson, as we have just seen, 
every actual fact must contain some memory 
otherwise it would not be a fact but simply 
matter, since it is an act of memory that turns 
matter into perceived fact. Our ordinary 
more or less familiar facts, however, contain 
much more than this bare minimum. The 
facts of everyday life are perceived as familiar 
and classified from a vast number of points of 
view. When you look at a cherry you recog- 
nise its colour, shape, etc., you know it is 
edible, what it would taste like, whether it is 
ripe, and much more besides, all at a glance. 
All this knowledge depends on memory, 
memory gives meaning to what we might call 
bare sensation (which is the same thing as 

89 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

Bergson's present matter) as opposed to the 
full familiar fact actually experienced. Now 
the meaning is ordinarily contained in the 
actual fact along with the bare sensation, not 
as a multiplicity of memories distinct from the 
bare sensation, but, as we put it, at a glance. 
This peculiar flavour of a familiar fact can be 
analysed out as consisting of memories of this 
or that past experience, if we choose to treat it 
in that way, just as a fact can be analysed into 
qualities. According to Bergson this analysis 
of the meaning of a familiar fact into memories 
would have the same drawbacks as the analysis 
of a present fact into qualities : it would leave 
out much of the meaning and distort the rest. 
Bergson holds that wherever there is duration 
the past must be preserved since it is just the 
preservation of the past, the creation of fact 
by a synthesis of what, out of synthesis, 
would be past and present, which constitutes 
duration. The essential point about mental 
life is just the performing of this act of syn- 
thesis which makes duration : wherever there 
is mental life there is duration and so wherever 
there is mental life the past is preserved. 
" Above everything," Bergson says, " con- 
sciousness signifies memory. At this moment 
as I discuss with you I pronounce the word 
" discussion.' ' It is clear that my conscious- 
ness grasps this word altogether ; if not it 
would not see it as a unique word and would 
not make sense of it. And yet when I pro- 

90 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

nounce the last syllable of the word the two 
first ones have already been pronounced ; 
relatively to this one, which must then be 
called present, they are past. But this last 
syllable " sion " was not pronounced instan- 
taneously ; the time, however short, during 
which I was saying it, can be split up into 
parts and these parts are past, relatively to 
the last of them, and this last one would be 
present if it were not that it too can be further 
split up : so that, do what you will, you 
cannot draw any line of demarcation between 
past and present, and so between memory and 
consciousness. Indeed when I pronounce the 
word " discussion " I have before my mind, 
not only the beginning, the middle and the 
end of the word, but also the preceding words, 
also the whole of the sentence which I have 
already spoken ; if it were not so I should 
have lost the thread of my speech. Now if 
the punctuation of the speech had been 
different my sentence might have begun 
earlier ; it might, for instance, have contained 
the previous sentence and my " present " 
would have been still further extended into 
the past. Let us push this reasoning to its 
conclusion : let us suppose that my speech has 
lasted for years, since the first awakening of 
my consciousness, that it has consisted of a 
single sentence, and that my consciousness 
has been sufficiently detached from the future, 
sufficiently disinterested to occupy itself ex- 

9i 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

clusively in taking in the meaning of the sen- 
tence : in that case I should not look for any 
explanation of the total conservation of this 
sentence any more than I look for one of the 
survival of the first two syllables of the word 
" discussion " when I pronounce the last one. 
Well, I think that our whole inner life is like a 
single sentence, begun from the first awakening 
of consciousness, a sentence scattered with 
commas, but nowhere broken by a full stop. 
And so I think that our whole past is there, 
subconscious — I mean present to us in such a 
way that our consciousness, to become aware 
of it, need not go outside itself nor add any- 
thing foreign : to perceive clearly all that it 
contains, or rather all that it is, it has only 
to put aside an obstacle, to lift a veil. "* 

If this theory of memory be correct, the 
occurrence of any present bare sensation itself 
suffices to recall, in some sense, the whole past. 
But this is no use for practical purposes, just 
as the whole of the fact given in present per- 
ception is useless for practical purposes until 
it has been analysed into qualities. According 
to Bergson we treat the material supplied by 
memory in much the same way as that supplied 
by perception. The whole field of the past 
which the present calls up is much wider than 
what we actually remember clearly : what 
we actually remember is arrived at by ignoring 
all the past except such scraps as appear to 

* L'Energie Spirituelle — " L'Ame et le Corps," pages 59 and 60. 
92 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

form useful precedents for behaviour in the 
present situation in which we find ourselves. 
Perhaps this explains why sometimes, at the 
point of death, when useful behaviour is no 
longer possible, this selection breaks down 
and the whole of the past floods back into 
memory. The brain, according to Bergson, 
is the organ whose function it is to perform 
this necessary work of selection out of the 
whole field of virtual memory of practically 
useful fragments, and so long as the brain is 
in order, only these are allowed to come 
through into consciousness as clear memories. 
The passage just quoted goes on to speak of 
" the part played by the brain in memory/ ' 
" The brain does not serve to preserve the past 
but primarily to obscure it, and then to let just 
so much as is practically useful slip through/' 

But the setting of the whole past, though 
it is ignored for convenience, still makes itself 
felt in the peculiar qualitative flavour which 
belongs to every present fact by reason of its 
past. Even in the case of familiar facts this 
flavour is no mere repetition but is perpetually 
modified as the familiarity increases, and it is 
just in this progressively changing flavour 
that their familiarity consists. 

An inspection of what we know directly, 
then, does not bear out the common sense 
theory that perceived familiarity, upon which 
abstraction and all description and explana- 
tion are based, consists in the perception of 

93 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

similar qualities shared by present matter and 
the matter retained by memory. A familiar 
fact appears to be, not a repetition, but a new 
fact. This new fact may be described as 
containing present and past bare sensations, 
but it must be added that these bare sensations 
do not remain distinct things but are synthe- 
sised by the act of perception into a fresh 
whole which is not the sum of the bare sensa- 
tions which it may be described as containing. 
Such a perceived whole will be familiar, and 
so lend itself to abstraction and explanation, 
in so far as the present bare sensation which 
it contains, taken as mere matter (that is apart 
from the act of perception which turns it from 
mere matter into actual fact), would have 
been a repetition of some of the past bare 
sensations which go to form its meaning and 
combine with it to create the fact actually 
known. For bare sensation now may be a 
repetition of past bare sensation though the 
full fact will always be something fresh, its 
flavour changing as it grows more and more 
familiar by taking up into itself more and 
more bare sensation which, taken in abstraction 
apart from the act of synthesis which turns 
it into actual fact, would be repetitions. To 
take the example which we have already used 
of perceiving first a rose and then a strawberry 
ice cream : let us suppose that the rose was 
the very first occasion on which you saw pink. 
The perceived fact on that occasion would, 

94 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

like all perceived facts, be a combination of 
past and present bare sensations. It would 
not be familiar because the elements of present 
bare sensation would not be repetitions of the 
elements of past bare sensation (always assum- 
ing, as we must for purposes of explanation, 
that past and present bare sensations ever 
could be isolated from the actual fact and still 
both exist, which, however, is not possible). 
But when you saw the strawberry ice cream 
the past perceived rose would be among the 
memories added to this bare sensation which 
constitute its meaning and, by forming a 
synthesis with it, turn it from mere matter into 
fact. The pink would now be perceived as 
familiar because the pink of the rose (which 
as bare sensation is similar to the bare sensa- 
tion of strawberry-ice-cream-pink) would be 
included, along with the present bare sensation 
of pink, in the whole fact of the perception of 
strawberry ice cream. 

Perceived fact, then, combines meaning 
and present bare sensation to form a whole 
with a qualitative flavour which is itself always 
unique, but which lends itself to abstraction 
in so far as the bare sensations, past and 
present, which go to produce it, would, as 
matter in isolation, be repetitions. 

This qualitative flavour, however, is, of 
course, not a quality in the logical sense which 
implies distinctness and externality of rela- 
tions. Facts have logical qualities onty if 

95 g 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

they are taken in abstraction isolated from 
their context. This is not how fact actually 
occurs. Every fact occurs in the course of 
the duration of some mental life which itself 
changes as a process of duration and not as a 
logical series. The mental life of an indi- 
vidual is, as it were, a comprehensive fact 
which embraces all the facts directly known to 
that individual in a single process of creative 
duration. Facts are to the mental life of an 
individual what bare sensation is to the actual 
fact directly known in perception : facts are, 
as it were, the matter of mental life. Imagine 
a fact directly known, such as we have 
described in discussing sensible perception, 
lasting on and on, perpetually taking up new 
bare sensations and complicating them with 
meaning which consists of all the past which 
it already contains so as to make out of this 
combination of past and present fresh fact, 
that will give you some idea of the way in 
which Bergson thinks that mental life is 
created out of matter by memory. Only this 
description is still unsatisfactory because it is 
obliged to speak of what is created either in 
the plural or in the singular and so fails to 
convey either the differentiation contained in 
mental life or else its unbroken continuity 
as all one fact progressively modified by 
absorbing more and more matter. 

If Bergson's account of the way in which 
memory works is true there is a sense in which 

96 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

the whole past of every individual is preserved 
in memory and all unites with any present 
bare sensation to constitute the fact directly 
known to him at any given moment. If the 
continuity of duration is really unbroken there 
is no possibility of any of the past being lost. 

This is why Bergson maintains that the 
whole of our past is contained in our virtual 
knowledge : what he means by our virtual 
knowledge is simply everything which enters 
into the process of duration which constitutes 
our whole mental life. Besides our whole 
past this virtual knowledge must also contain 
much more of present bare sensation than we 
are usually aware of. 

We said that, for Bergson, actual fact directly 
known was the only reality ; this actual fact, 
however, does not mean merely what is present 
to the perception of a given individual at any 
given moment, but the whole of our virtual 
knowledge. The field of virtual knowledge 
would cover much the same region as the 
subconscious, which plays such an important 
part in modern psychology. The limits of this 
field are impossible to determine. Once you 
give up limiting direct knowledge to the fact 
actually present in perception at any given 
moment it is difficult to draw the line any- 
where. And yet to draw the line at the pre- 
sent moment is impossible for " the present 
moment " is clearly an abstract fiction. For 
practical purposes " the present " is what is 

97 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

known as " the specious present," which 
covers a certain ill-defined period of duration 
from which the instantaneous " present 
moment " is recognised to be a mere abstrac- 
tion. According to Bergson, however, just 
as " the present moment ft is only an abstrac- 
tion from a wider specious present so this 
specious present itself is an abstraction from a 
continuous process of duration from which 
other abstractions, days, weeks, years, can 
be made, but which is actually unbroken and 
forms a single continuous changing whole. 
And just as facts are only abstractions from 
the whole mental life of an individual so 
individuals must be regarded as abstractions 
from some more comprehensive mental whole 
and thus our virtual knowledge seems not 
merely to extend over the whole of what is 
embraced by our individual acts of perception 
and preserved by our individual memories but 
overflows even these limits and must be 
regarded as co-extensive with the duration 
of the whole of reality. 

It may be open to question how much of 
this virtual knowledge of both past and 
present we ever could know directly in any 
sense comparable to the way in which we 
know the fact actually presented at some given 
moment, however perfectly we might succeed 
in ridding ourselves with our intellectual 
pre-occupation with explaining instead of 
knowing; but, if reality forms an unbroken 

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MATTER AND MEMORY 

whole in duration, we cannot in advance set 
any limits, short of the whole of reality, to the 
field of virtual knowledge. And it does really 
seem as if our pre-occupation with discovering 
repetitions in the interests of explanation had 
something to do with the limited extent of the 
direct knowledge which we ordinarily enjoy, 
so that, if we could overcome this bias, we 
might know more than we do now, though 
how much more it is not possible, in advance, 
to predict. For in the whole field of virtual 
knowledge, which appears to be continuous 
with the little scrap of fact which is all that 
we usually attend to, present bare sensation 
and such bare sensations as resemble it, form 
very insignificant elements : for purposes of 
abstraction and explanation, however, it is 
only these insignificant elements that are of 
any use. So long, therefore, as we are pre- 
occupied with abstraction, we must bend all 
our energies towards isolating these fragments 
from the context which extends out and out 
over the whole field of virtual knowledge, 
rivetting our attention on them and, as far 
as possible, ignoring all the rest. If Bergson's 
theory of virtual knowledge is correct, then, 
it does seem as if normally our efforts were 
directed towards shutting out most of our 
knowledge rather than towards enjoying it, 
towards forgetting the greater part of what 
memory contains rather than towards remem- 
bering it. 

99 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

If we really could reverse this effort and 
concentrate upon knowing the whole field of 
past and present as fully as possible, instead 
of classifying it, which involves selecting part 
of the field and ignoring the rest, it is theoret- 
ically conceivable that we might succeed in 
knowing directly the whole of the process of 
duration which constitutes the individual 
mental life of each one of us. And it is not 
even certain that our knowledge must neces- 
sarily be confined within the limits of what 
we have called our individual mental life. 
Particular facts, as we have seen, are not 
really distinct parts of a single individual 
mental fife : the notion of separateness applies 
only to abstractions and it is only because 
we are much more pre-occupied with abstrac- 
tions than with actual facts that we come to 
suppose that facts can ever really be separate 
from one another. When we shake off our 
common sense assumptions and examine the 
actual facts which we know directly we find 
that they form a process and not a logical 
series of distinct facts one after the other. 
Now on analogy it seems possible that what 
we call individual mental fives are, to the 
wider process which contains and constitutes 
the whole of reality, as particular facts are to 
the whole process which constitutes each 
individual mental life. The whole of reality 
may contain individual lives as these contain 
particular facts, not as separate distinct units 

ioo 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

in logical relations, but as a process in which 
the line of demarcation between " the parts " 
(if we must speak of " parts ") is not clear cut. 
If this analogy holds then it is impossible in 
advance to set any limits to the field of direct 
knowledge which it may be in our power to 
secure by reversing our usual mental attitude 
and devoting our energies simply to knowing, 
instead of to classifying and explaining. 

But without going beyond the limits of our 
individual experience, and even without com- 
ing to know directly the whole field of past 
and present fact which that experience con- 
tains, it is still a considerable gain to our 
direct knowledge if we realize what false 
assumptions our preoccupation with classifi- 
cation leads us to make even about the very 
limited facts to which our direct knowledge 
is ordinarily confined. We then realize that, 
besides being considerably less than what we 
probably have it in our power to know, these 
few facts that we do know are themselves by 
no means what we commonly suppose them 
to be. 

The two fundamental errors into which 
common sense leads us about the facts are the 
assumptions that they have the logical form, 
that is contain mutually exclusive parts in 
external relations, and that these parts can 
be repeated over and over again. These two 
false assumptions are summed up in the 
common sense view that the fact which we 

IOI 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

know directly actually consists of events, 
things, states, qualities. Bergson tells us 
that when once we have realized that this is 
not the case we have begun to be philosophers. 

Having stripped the veil of common sense 
assumptions from what we know directly our 
task will then be to hold this direct know- 
ledge before us so as to know as much 
as possible. The act by which we know 
directly is the very same act by which we 
perceive and remember ; these are all simply 
acts of synthesis, efforts to turn matter into 
creative duration. What we have to do is, 
as it were, to make a big act of perception 
to embrace as wild a field as possible of past 
and present as a single fact directly known. 
This act of synthesis Bergson calls " intuition. " 

Intuition may be described as turning past 
and present into fact directly known by 
transforming it from mere matter into a 
creative process of duration : but, of course, 
actually, there is not, first matter, then an 
act of intuition which synthesises it, and 
finally a fact in duration, there is simply the 
duration, and the matter and the act of 
intuition are only abstractions by which we 
describe and explain it. 

The effort of intuition is the reversal of 
the intellectual effort to abstract and explain 
which is our usual way of treating facts, and 
these two ways of attending are incompatible 
and cannot both be carried on together. 

102 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

Intuition, (or, to give it a more familiar name, 
direct knowledge,) reveals fact : intellectual 
attention analyses and classifies this fact in 
order to explain it in general terms, that is 
to explain it by substituting abstractions for 
the actual fact. Obviously we cannot per- 
form acts of analysis without some fact to 
serve as material : analysis uses the facts 
supplied by direct knowledge as its material. 
Bergson maintains that in so doing it limits 
and distorts these facts and he says that if 
we are looking for speculative knowledge we 
must go back to direct knowledge, or, as he 
calls it, intuition. 

But bare acquaintance is in-communicable, 
moreover it requires a great effort to main- 
tain it. In order to communicate it and 
retain the power of getting the facts back 
again after we have relaxed our grip on them 
we are obliged, once we have obtained the 
fullest direct knowledge of which we are 
capable, to apply the intellectual method to 
the fact thus revealed and attempt to describe 
it in general terms. 

Now the directly known forms a creative 
duration whose special characteristics are 
that it is non-logical, (i.e., is not made up of 
distinct mutually exclusive terms united by 
external relations) and does not contain parts 
which can be repeated over and over, while 
on the other hand the terms which we have 
to substitute for it if we want to describe it 

103 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

only stand for repetitions and have the 
logical form. It looks, therefore, as if our 
descriptions could not, as they stand, be very 
successful in conveying to others the fact 
known to us directly, or in recalling it to our- 
selves. 

In order that the description substituted 
by our intellectual activity for the facts which 
we want to describe may convey these facts 
it is necessary to perform an act of synthesis 
on the description analogous to the act of 
perception which originally created the fact 
itself out of mere matter. The words used in 
a description should be to the hearer what 
mere matter is to the perceiver : in order that 
matter may be perceived an act of synthesis 
must be performed by which the matter is 
turned into fact in duration : similarly in order 
to gather what a description of a fact means 
the hearer must take the general terms which 
are employed not as being distinct and 
mutually exclusive but as modifying one 
another and interpenetrating in the way in 
which the " parts " of a process of creative 
duration interpenetrate. In the same way by 
understanding the terms employed synthet- 
ically and not intellectually we can use a 
description to recall any fact which we have 
once known directly. Thus our knowledge 
advances by alternate acts of direct acquaint- 
ance and analysis. 

Philosophy must start from a fresh effort 
104 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

of acquaintance creating, if possible, a fact 
wider and fuller than the facts which we are 
content to know for the purposes of everyday 
life. But analysis is essential if the fact 
thus directly known is to be conveyed to 
others and recalled. By analysis the philoso- 
pher fixes this wider field in order that he 
may communicate and recall it. Starting 
later from the description of some fact ob- 
tained by a previous effort of acquaintance, 
or from several facts obtained at different 
times, and also from the facts described by 
others, and using all these descriptions as 
material, it may be possible, by a fresh effort, 
to perform acts of acquaintance, (or synthe- 
sis) embracing ever wider and wider fields of 
knowledge. This, according to Bergson, is 
the way in which philosophical knowledge 
should be built up, facts, obtained by acts 
of acquaintance, being translated into de- 
scriptions only that these descriptions may 
again be further synthesised so directing our 
attention to more and more comprehensive 
facts. 

Inevitably, of course, these facts them- 
selves, being less than all the stream of 
creative duration to which they belong, will 
be abstractions, if taken apart from that 
whole stream, and so distorted. This flaw 
in what we know even by direct acquaintance 
can never be wholly remedied short of our 
succeeding in becoming acquainted with the 

105 



THE MISUSE OF MIND 

whole of duration. It is something, how- 
ever, to be aware of the flaw, even if we cannot 
wholly remedy it, and the wider the acquaint- 
ance the less is the imperfection in the fact 
known. 

The first step, in any case, towards obtain- 
ing the wider acquaintance at which philosophy 
aims consists in making the effort necessary to 
rid ourselves of the practical preoccupation 
which gives us our bias towards explain- 
ing everything long before we have allowed 
ourselves time to pay proper attention to it, 
in order that we may at least get back to 
such actual facts as we do already know 
directly. When this has been accomplished 
(and our intellectual habits are so deeply 
ingrained that the task is by no means easy) 
we can then go on to other philosophers' 
descriptions of the facts with which their 
own efforts to widen their direct knowledge 
have acquainted them and, by synthesising 
the general terms which they have been 
obliged to employ, we also may come to know 
these more comprehensive facts. Unless it 
is understood synthetically, however, a phil- 
osopher's description of the facts with which 
he has acquainted himself will be altogether 
unsatisfactory and misleading. It is in this 
way that Bergson's own analysis of the fact 
which we all know directly into matter and 
the act of memory by which matter is turned 
into a creative process should be understood. 

106 



MATTER AND MEMORY 

The matter and the act of memory are both 
abstractions from the actual fact : he does 
not mean that over and above the fact there 
is either any matter or any force or activity 
called memory nor are these things supposed 
to be in the actual fact : they are simply 
abstract terms in which the fact is described. 

Bergson tries elsewhere to put the same 
point by saying that there are two tendencies 
in reality, one towards space (that is logical 
form) and the other towards duration, and 
that the actual fact which we know directly 
" tends " now towards " space " and now 
towards duration. The two faculties in- 
tellect and intuition are likewise fictions 
which are not really supposed to exist, distinct 
from the fact to which they are applied, but 
are simply abstract notions invented for the 
sake of description. 

Whatever the description by which a phil- 
osopher attempts to convey what he has 
discovered we shall only understand it if 
we remember thit the terms in which the 
fact is described are not actually parts of 
the fact itself and can only convey the mean- 
ing intended if they are grasped by synthesis 
and not intellectually understood. 



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